[abraham ascher] the revolution of 1905 a short h(book4you.org)

The Revolution of 1905


A Short History

Abraham Ascher

stanford university press

stanford, california 2004

Stanford University PressStanford, California

© 2004 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or trans-mitted in any form or by any means, electronic or me-chanical, including photocopying and recording, or inany information storage or retrieval system without theprior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free,archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ascher, Abraham, date-The Revolution of 1905 : a short history / Abraham Ascher.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-8047-4719-9 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8047-5028-9

(pbk. : alk. paper)1. Russia—History—Revolution, 1905-1907. I. Title.

DK263 .A93 2004947.08'3—dc22 2003027549

Original Printing 2004Last figure below indicates year of this printing:13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04

Typeset by Alan Noyes in 10/12 Sabon

To our grandchildren,Alexander, Maya, and

Nathaniel

Contents

Preface, ix

1. The Old Regime Under Siege, 1

2. The Assault on Authority, 39

3. The General Strike, 67

4. The Days of Liberty and Armed Uprising, 90

5. Implementing Reform, 112

6. The Duma, 131

7. A New Government Takes Command, 160

8. Coup d’État, 187

Conclusion, 211

Suggested Reading, 219

Index, 223

Preface

This book is essentially a precis of my two-volume work, The Revolutionof 1905, published by Stanford University Press in 1988 and 1992. I real-ize, of course, that in paring down by about two-thirds my earlier accountof Russia’s first revolution, which really began in 1904 and ended in 1907,I had to leave out many details that are normally considered central inworks of history. I also realize, however, that few students or general read-ers have the time or inclination to read 720 pages of text and another 67pages of notes, even on events that, in the view of many political activistsand historians, made inevitable the more momentous Revolution of1917. As I proceeded with the abridgment of my initial study, it becameclear that a credible account of the Revolution of 1905 covering all itsmajor aspects could be encompassed in a considerably shorter book.Readers who are interested in more details on any specific topic can turnto the larger work, where they will also find the documentation for myfindings as well as an extensive bibliography.

The interpretation of 1905 as the event that necessarily led to the Bol-shevik seizure of power in 1917 owes its origins to Vladimir Lenin, who in1920 referred to the first revolution as the “dress rehearsal,” without whichthe “victory of the October Revolution in 1917 would have been impossi-ble.” Thereafter, Soviet historians explored 1905 with remarkable diligenceand invariably quoted Lenin’s pithy comment, which, they believed, settledthe question of why the revolution was a pivotal event in modern history.As early as 1930, a scholarly bibliography devoted to Russian publicationson 1905 ran to 715 pages, and in the succeeding sixty years that literaturecontinued to grow at a very rapid pace. The Revolution of 1917 occupiedfirst place in Soviet historical consciousness, but the Revolution of 1905 didnot lag far behind.

The intense interest in 1905 in the Soviet Union must be seen as partof a general concern by the political leadership to enhance the legitimacyof Communism. If it could be demonstrated that Leninist policies were

unimpeachable even in 1905, when the Bolsheviks suffered a major polit-ical and military defeat, then the Communist Party’s claims to preemi-nence in Soviet society and in the worldwide struggle for socialism wouldbe that much stronger. This concern with legitimacy explains the enor-mous outpouring of works on 1905 for mass circulation, generally writ-ten by well-established scholars. In 1985, only six years before the collapseof the Soviet Union, a reference book on 1905 by noted historians for thegeneral public was issued in a run of 175,000 copies. After recounting thestandard Leninist view on the subject, the authors discussed the “echo” ofthe revolution across five continents, including in such countries as Cuba,Uruguay, and Algeria, where interest in Russia was altogether slight at thetime.

Although it is dubious whether the Revolution of 1905 was in fact thedress rehearsal for 1917, in one respect the link between the two is indis-putable. Bolshevism emerged as a distinct political movement during thefirst revolution. Strictly speaking, the movement originated in 1903, butonly after the spread of unrest in 1904 did Lenin and his followers beginto formulate the strategies and tactics that became the essentials of Bol-shevism, distinguishing it fully from other strands of Marxism.

During the past three decades or so, Western historians, too, have de-voted a great deal of attention to Russia in the turbulent years from 1904to 1907. Their interpretations vary widely, running the spectrum fromMarxist to liberal to conservative, and even within these broad categoriesthere are distinct differences. For our purposes, it suffices to delineate themajor lines of interpretation. Social historians and most historians on theleft tend to argue that the masses, and in particular the working class,were at all times the driving force of the revolution. Moreover, many ofthem consider Bloody Sunday (January 9, 1905), the day soldiers fired onan unarmed procession, to have been the starting point of the upheavaland view the armed uprising in Moscow in December of that year as itshigh point. Finally, these historians dismiss as totally inadequate the con-cessions granted by the government to the opposition, contending that inlight of the determination of the ruling groups to hold on to power, Russiacould not have been transformed peacefully into a constitutional monar-chy along the Western European model. By contrast, conservative histori-ans insist that it was the radicalism and intransigence of the oppositionthat at every turn of the revolution undermined the chances of a gradualtransition to constitutionalism.

The interpretation I find most congenial might be characterized, forwant of a better term, as “broadly liberal.” It depicts the revolution not

x Preface

as an event that made any one path of development inevitable, but ratheras a critical juncture that opened up several paths. Under intense pres-sure, initially from liberals for political change and then from other so-cial groups also interested in economic and social change, the autocracyappeared to suffer a loss of nerve. For an entire year, beginning in the fallof 1904, the government oscillated between accommodation and repres-sion, but neither policy succeeded in ending the unrest. On the contrary,the government’s inconsistency was taken as a sign of weakness by thevarious groups within the opposition, encouraging them to step up theiragitation.

During the general strike in October 1905—the high point of the rev-olution in the “liberal” interpretation—the pressure from mass move-ments became so acute that it drove the autocracy to the verge of col-lapse, making possible Russia’s transformation into a constitutional stateon the Western model. Even though that prospect did not materialize,some institutional changes introduced during the period of unrest sur-vived the failure of the revolution. Most notably, Russia retained anelected legislature as well as political parties speaking for various socialand economic interests. The participants in the revolution failed toachieve their major goal, namely, the total dismantling of the autocraticregime, but the old order did not emerge unscathed from the three yearsof conflict. Despite all claims to the contrary, it had been substantiallyweakened, probably beyond repair.

When I considered writing a short history of 1905 it occurred to methat such a work might appeal to the growing number of students andgeneral readers interested in comparative history and in the painful tran-sition endured by societies that are economically still largely agrarian andauthoritarian as they seek to establish polities with viable representativeinstitutions. Of course, what happened in Russia in the years from 1904to 1907 had many unique features, but in certain respects the turbulenceamounted to a new kind of upheaval that presaged later ones in the twen-tieth century.

The challenge to the established order in Russia came from massmovements representing four different social groups: liberals among themiddle class and gentry; industrial workers; peasants; and some nationalminorities. Serious disturbances broke out in various cities, agrarian re-gions, and outlying areas of the empire, as well as in many cultural insti-tutions and in the army and navy. Virtually no social group or geograph-ical region remained unaffected by the unrest. In a few regions of theRussian Empire, the onslaughts against the authorities actually forced

Preface xi

tsarist officials to flee, which left the responsibility for local governmenttemporarily in the hands of the insurgents. Had the disorders occurred si-multaneously throughout the country, the government probably wouldnot have been able to survive.

The dynamism of the industrial workers was yet another striking andnovel feature of the revolution in Russia. For a few weeks late in 1905,this group, which was only a tiny segment of the country’s total popula-tion, spearheaded the political campaigns against the autocracy thatbrought the government to its knees. Moreover, in St. Petersburg andelsewhere, workers formed an institution (the soviet) that briefly assumedsome of the prerogatives of government in the capital. All these featuresmake the Revolution of 1905 an especially good starting point for a com-parative study of modern revolutions.

This is not to say that there was one clear pattern to the events in Rus-sia as they unfolded from 1904 to 1907. Nor was there such a pattern inlater revolutions elsewhere. The overall picture in Russia is one of greatcomplexity. No one social group dominated the opposition throughoutthe period. Many of the leading participants changed strategies and tac-tics in the light of changing circumstances. There were ebbs and flows inthe revolution, whose course was determined by various factors: a sense-less war that Russia fought against Japan; the resolve of countless peopleto seek relief from their burdens; the government’s clumsy attempts tohalt the unrest; and, finally, the judgments of individuals about thestrength of the movements they supported and the intentions and re-silience of their opponents.

An approach to the study of 1905 that does not link it directly to themore momentous Revolution of 1917 but, instead, that stresses com-plexity and ambiguity, might seem to deprive the first revolution of someof its excitement. Such an approach, however, yields better—and ulti-mately more exciting—history: it is closer to what actually happened.The individuals who participated in the mass movements of 1905 did notbelieve that they were merely preparing the way for the real event at somefuture date. They were trying to bring about far-reaching changes thenand there. Furthermore, it is worth emphasizing that during the first fif-teen months of the revolution these endeavors were not necessarilydoomed to fail. On several occasions the authorities considered daring re-forms that might have satisfied enough of the opposition’s demands tohave brought the unrest to an end. The initial period of the revolutionmight aptly be designated as one of missed opportunities.

The problem was that the government always made its offers of reform

xii Preface

too late, a stance that proved to be costly. Concessions that would havebeen welcomed early in the spring of 1905 were rejected in the summer ofthat year by opposition leaders incensed at the pettiness, callousness, andobstinacy of the authorities. When in October the government at last didpromise to introduce fundamental changes, only a small portion of the op-position was willing to abandon the struggle. The authorities, who werenever fully reconciled to the reforms, soon began to renege on their prom-ises. Poor judgment and bad timing thus played a leading role in deter-mining the course of the revolution.

During the last eighteen months of the revolution, roughly from Janu-ary 1906 to June 1907, the conflict between the authorities and the oppo-sition assumed a dimension quite different from that of the initial period.There were no longer any eruptions of mass fury that shook the founda-tions of the empire or that forced the autocracy to make sweeping conces-sions, though lawlessness and political terror became more widespread.Because of the political concessions late in 1905, the conflict was nowplayed out to a large extent in the political arena. Political parties couldorganize their followers and could publish, more or less freely, newspapersas well as journals and pamphlets. To a degree unprecedented in Russia,workers and peasants could form various movements to promote their in-terests. The defenders of the old order also took advantage of the newfreedoms and created myriad organizations to advance the cause of theautocracy. In a real sense, the Russian people had become politicized, andthe Duma, the newly created representative institution, became the vortexof the many political storms in 1906 and 1907.

Under the circumstances, the overall atmosphere continued to be dan-gerously volatile, and many activists as well as government leaders ex-pected a new explosion from below. The clearest symptom of this turbu-lence was the frequency with which rumors were taken seriously. Withamazing regularity, rumors about the dissolution of the First and SecondDumas, the dismissal or resignation of prominent ministers, the estab-lishment of a dictatorship, and the outbreak of pogroms against Jews andliberals spread quickly and caused great anxiety, if not panic. Althoughthe rumors were often groundless, that they so easily gained credibilitywas a sign of the fluidity of the state of affairs and the despair that hadgripped the nation. The country had undergone so many traumas and thedistrust of the court and political leaders was so deep-seated that no taleof horror or willfulness could be dismissed out of hand. The politicalstorms subsided and the revolution can be said to have ended on June 3,1907, when Petr Stolypin, the resolute prime minister, dissolved the

Preface xiii

Duma and arbitrarily changed the electoral law in such a way as to inflicta fatal blow on the opposition, reducing it to virtual impotence.

On one level, it can be said that the men in positions of leadership insociety and in the state were guided throughout the period of revolutionby their wish to defend their interests and the interests of the socialgroups they claimed to represent. Yet by itself this does not adequatelyexplain their behavior. Neither side in the fierce conflict was a monolith;in both camps important figures disagreed with each other over polices aswell as tactics. Even more to the point, both statesmen and leaders of theopposition occasionally took positions out of keeping with their predilec-tions. It was not uncommon for archconservatives to favor far-reachingconcessions and for militants on the left to oppose bellicose tactics. A stu-dent of 1905 encounters many surprises, which is why the history of therevolution is such a complicated and fascinating story.

I should like to express my gratitude to those who encouraged me toundertake this short history of 1905 and helped me to bring it to light.Norris Pope, Editorial Director of Stanford University Press, was especiallyhelpful from the moment I mentioned the idea and has been supportivethroughout the period I worked on this volume. Once the manuscript wasin the hands of the Press, others, most notably Mariana Raykov, con-tributed greatly to bringing the project to completion.

xiv Preface

chapter one

The Old Regime Under Siege

the fragmented society

On the eve of the Revolution of 1905, Russia appeared to many of itssubjects to be divided into two irreconcilable camps: one favored themaintenance of the autocratic system of rule; the other was committed torule by the people. But in fact the state of affairs was much more compli-cated since both camps were highly fragmented. True, Tsar Nicholas II,the leader of the conservative forces, insisted that in keeping with long-standing traditions his orders must be obeyed “not merely from fear butaccording to the dictates of one’s conscience . . . [which are] ordained byGod himself.” Yet serious conflicts of interest among his supporters aswell as differences over how to handle the growing popular discontentpartially explain the authorities’ failure to pursue farsighted and consis-tent policies. At the same time, opponents of the old order disagreedsharply among themselves on the political, economic, and social changesthat Russia must undergo to modernize the country along Western Euro-pean lines. Only by keeping in mind the fragmentation of Russian soci-ety can one understand the complexity and ambiguous outcome of theturbulence that engulfed the country in the years from 1904 to 1907,which actually constitute the full span of the revolution and which willbe the focus of this book.

The tsar sought to impose his will on the vast empire of some 129 mil-lion people through an imperial bureaucracy, which served at the sover-eign’s pleasure and whose reach extended to the lowest level of local af-fairs. Although the ruler obviously could not control all activities in hisrealm, on issues about which he cared deeply, however trivial, his wordcould not easily be ignored. Moreover, his power could not be counter-balanced by public institutions. Created at the initiative of the state, theseinstitutions were much weaker than their counterpart in Western Europe,

and most of them were to a substantial degree beholden to the state. In-deed, the principle of freedom of association was not recognized; veryfew laws had been enacted regulating public meetings or the establish-ment of private societies. All gatherings of groups of a dozen or morepeople were suspect and required police approval. No public lecturescould be delivered without formal permission by the police, which gener-ally declined to issue permits. The organs of local self-government (electedzemstvos and city councils), established in the 1860s, were creations ofthe authorities in St. Petersburg, and during the era of counterreform thatbegan in the 1880s their functions and powers steadily eroded. The sen-ior administrators of the Orthodox Church, a powerful institution in acountry where the vast majority of the population was deeply religious,were servants of the state, appointed by the tsar.

The government went to great lengths to prevent the emergence of anorganized opposition to the autocratic regime. For one thing, it sought toshape public opinion by censoring books, periodicals, and newspapers.For another, it maintained a system of police surveillance, and arbitrarilymeted out severe punishment (internal exile or imprisonment) to anyoneconsidered “seditious,” a term defined very broadly. The political police(composed of the okhrana and the more secretive Special Section, bothdistinct and autonomous forces within the Department of Police) placedagents in educational, social, and political institutions as well as in facto-ries to keep an eye on actual and potential dissidents. And yet, ironically,despite Russia’s deserved reputation as a repressive police state, the po-lice force was not notably efficient, primarily because the state lacked themeans and personnel to create an effective security force, or, for that mat-ter, an effective administration. Corruption and other forms of dishonestyon the part of police officials as well as other civil servants were systemic,and this, in turn, undermined respect for public authorities.

Ultimately, of course, the reputation as well as the viability of an au-tocratic regime depend on the political sagacity and competence of theruler. It was Russia’s misfortune that Nicholas II, who ruled from 1894to 1917, possessed few qualifications to govern a powerful nation, leastof all during periods of crisis. Although moderately intelligent and a manof personal charm, he showed little serious interest in politics and lackedthe drive and vision to take charge of the government, to familiarizehimself with the workings of the administration, and to instill a sense ofpurpose and direction in the ministers and bureaucracy. He was also anarrow-minded, prejudiced man, incapable of tolerating people who didnot fit his conception of the true Russian. In a country in which close tohalf the population belonged to various minorities, such an attitude ofthe sovereign inevitably provoked widespread resentment.

2 Old Regime Under Siege

Old Regime Under Siege 3

At the time he ascended the throne, Nicholas was an unknown quan-tity to society at large, a fact that encouraged many enlightened people tohope that the new ruler would adopt policies more liberal than those ofhis father, Alexander III. But Nicholas quickly disabused the optimists byannouncing to a delegation representing the nobility, the zemstvos, andthe cities that they were entertaining “senseless dreams” of participating“in the affairs of internal administration.” He intended, he said, to“maintain the principle of autocracy just as firmly and unflinchingly asdid my unforgettable father.” This statement, it is worth noting, wasmade at a time when absolutism in Central and Western Europe had ei-ther been replaced by limited monarchies of varying types or by republi-can polities.

It was not until 1902 that Tsar Nicholas found a man in whom he hadfull confidence to serve as his preeminent minister in the government.That man was V. K. Plehve, who assumed the post of minister of internalaffairs. Highly intelligent and devoted to the preservation of absolutism,Plehve had few compunctions about using force to crush critics of autoc-racy, though at times he also favored more subtle approaches. He ac-quired the reputation of being the most reactionary and wiliest statesmanof late-imperial Russia.

Plehve’s powers were immense. The Ministry of Internal Affairs wascomposed not only of various branches of the police but also of separatedepartments responsible for economic affairs in the countryside, the mailand telegraph services, non-Orthodox religions, censorship, and the pe-nal system. The governors of the provinces reported to the minister of in-ternal affairs, who also exercised substantial authority over the zemstvosand city councils. It is no exaggeration to say that hardly any aspect ofdomestic policy remained outside the jurisdiction of Plehve’s department.

Although Plehve devised some measures to conciliate the growing op-position, he did not favor granting any class or social group in society agenuine voice in government, for he considered both the masses and theeducated groups inadequately trained for such a role. Obsessed with themaintenance of order and stability, he could not tolerate the slightest ex-pression of criticism of the authorities. Nor was he capable of distin-guishing between moderates who were loyal monarchists but favoredgradual liberalization of the country’s political institutions and radicalswho advocated a fundamental reordering of society. To root out all op-position to the prevailing order, he ordered extensive police searches andstepped up the policy of Russification—the imposition of Russian cultureon the minorities—throughout the empire. He directed his fire in partic-ular against the zemstvos, ordering their employees summarily arrested,regularly overturning decisions of their assemblies, frequently refusing to

confirm in office representatives elected by the zemstvo assemblies toserve on their boards, and prohibiting zemstvos from even discussingsuch topics as universal education.

Neither Plehve, the tsar, nor most of the other men in positions of au-thority understood that the growing agitation for reform, far from beinga passing phenomenon, had deep roots in Russian society. Ever since theearly nineteenth century, many among the intelligentsia (writers, philoso-phers, political activists, and artists) had taken a critical stance towardthe prevailing order. Their motives and aims varied, but they were unitedin the belief that the country’s backwardness as compared to Western Eu-rope was unacceptable. The various mass movements committed to po-litical change that emerged in the early twentieth century owed theirprograms—or, perhaps more accurately, their ideologies—to the intelli-gentsia, but at the same time none of these ideologies would have at-tracted a large following without the profound economic, social, and cul-tural changes that occurred after the 1860s, many of which thegovernment itself initiated.

Russia’s humiliating defeat on her own soil during the Crimean War(1853–56) had amply demonstrated that the country’s economic and so-cial backwardness had sapped its national strength. To a large extent,that defeat prompted the government to undertake the Great Reforms ofthe 1860s and 1870s, which abolished serfdom, created the zemstvos, es-tablished the rudiments of the rule of law, and modernized the army. Butby the 1880s and 1890s it was clear that by themselves these reforms,however far-reaching, could not maintain Russia as a European powersuch as it had been early in the nineteenth century. To regain its positionas a significant actor in the international arena, the country would haveto be modernized economically; that is, it would have to embark on aprogram of rapid industrialization. But the men in authority did not un-derstand the implications of such a course. They deluded themselves intobelieving that they could modernize the country economically without al-tering the traditional social and political order.

No one fostered the illusion more fervently than S. Iu. Witte, the bril-liant architect of Russian industrialization. A man of broad experience inthe civil service and in private business, Witte became head of the Rail-way Department of the Ministry of Finance in 1889. He was so effectivethat three years later, at the age of forty-three, he was appointed ministerof finance, and this marked the beginning of a fourteen-year period of ex-traordinary influence at the highest echelons of government.

Witte contended that if Russia, a latecomer to industrialization, was tomake rapid progress in modernizing the economy, the state would haveto play a large role in stimulating the process. He therefore launched an



array of interrelated programs, the main purpose of which was to amasscapital investment. Among other things, he promoted foreign loans andinvestments, established confidence in Russia’s financial system by adopt-ing the gold standard, placed extremely high tariffs on foreign industrialcommodities, and substantially raised the rates of taxation. A large shareof the financial burden for these programs fell on low-income groups, es-pecially the peasants, who had to pay high prices for manufactured goodsand absorb the high indirect taxes on such items as tobacco, sugar,matches, and petroleum.

The state also participated directly in the nation’s economy to an ex-tent unequaled in any Western country. For example, in 1899 the statebought almost two-thirds of all metallurgical production. By the earlytwentieth century it controlled some 70 percent of the railways andowned vast tracts of land, numerous mines and oil fields, and extensiveforests. The national budgets from 1903 to 1913 indicated that the gov-ernment received more than 25 percent of its income from various hold-ings. The economic well-being of private entrepreneurs thus depended inlarge measure on decisions by the authorities in St. Petersburg. This wasa major reason for the relatively timid approach to politics of a substan-tial sector of the Russian middle class prior to 1905.

Russia’s economic progress during the eleven years of Witte’s tenure asminister of finance was, by every standard, remarkable. Railway trackagevirtually doubled, coal output in southern Russia jumped from 183 mil-lion poods in 1890 to 671 million in 1900 (1 pood equals 36.11 pounds).In the same region, the production of iron and steel rose from 8.6 millionpoods in 1890 to 75.8 million in 1900. Also, between 1890 and 1900 theproduction of cotton thread almost doubled and that of cloth increasedby about two-thirds. By 1914 the Russian Empire was the fifth industrialpower in the world, though labor productivity as well as per-capita in-come still lagged far behind those in Western Europe.

These vast changes forced the authorities to take stock of some of theirmost cherished beliefs. Until 1905, senior government officials almostwithout exception contended that relations between employers andworkers would be patriarchal in character, comparable to the relationsbetween landlords and peasants, and that there was therefore no reasonto fear trouble from below. The truth is that even though in the late1890s the total number of industrial workers was only about 3 million(2.4 percent of the country’s population) there were already signs ofworking-class militancy that in some respects surpassed the militancy ofworkers in the West. There were several reasons for this. Because of theheavy state involvement in economic development and the adoption ofthe most advanced forms of production and factory organization, Russia’s

manufacturing economy was more heavily concentrated than those ofGermany and the United States, usually singled out as the pathfinders inthis regard. The existence of large factories was a boon to labor organiz-ers and political militants, who could easily reach sizable numbers ofworkers resentful of the harsh conditions at the workplace.

Moreover, the “disciplinary paternalism” that governed relations be-tween factory owners and workers placed the latter in an extremely dis-advantageous position. Collective resistance to the employer was consid-ered tantamount to an uprising against the state, punishable by fifteen totwenty years of hard labor. A strike for higher wages could result inprison sentences of three weeks to three months for agitators and sevendays to three weeks for participants. Conditions for factory workers weregrim. After 1897 workers normally toiled eleven and a half hours a day,five days a week and somewhat less on Saturdays. Their wages were ex-ceedingly low, and since many of them returned for part of the year totheir villages to work in the fields, they were housed in large, unsanitarybarracks during their service at factories. Finally, employers and theirmanagers condescended to the laborers, addressing them in the familiar“thou,” searching them for stolen goods at the end of the workday, andimposing fines on them for infractions of the intricate “Rules of InternalOrder.” Any act of insubordination was punishable by a fine. It seemedto many workers that they were treated as “servants and slaves.”

It did not take long for Russian workers to disprove the government’sclaim that they were content and would remain docile. Between 1862 and1869 six strikes and twenty-nine “disturbances” took place; from 1870to 1885 the average number of annual strikes rose to twenty and thenumber of disturbances from three to seventy-three. Then, with the in-tensification of economic development, labor unrest continued to riserapidly. Between 1886 and 1894 the annual average number of strikeswas thirty-three; between 1895 and 1904, one hundred seventy-six. Dur-ing the massive strikes in 1896 and 1897 in the textile mills of St. Peters-burg, workers revealed an unprecedented degree of sophistication, unity,and discipline. There could no longer be any doubt about the Russianworkers’ ability to act forcefully to advance their interests. The strikemovement reached it highest level in the period before Revolution of1905 in 1903, when 138,877 workers engaged in 550 work stoppages.

The government tried in various ways to appease workers. In 1882, itenacted laws to prohibit the employment of children under twelve and alsoestablished factory inspectors to enforce the legislation. In 1901, it adoptedan experiment in police unionization known as Zubatovshchina, or po-lice socialism. The scheme was the brainchild of S. V. Zubatov, one of themore colorful and imaginative police officers in prerevolutionary Russia.Zubatov envisioned the evolution of the tsarist regime into a “social



monarchy,” whose authority would be strengthened immensely by its as-sumption of the role of mediator in the struggle between capitalists andworkers. Under his aegis, government officials organized a series of “po-lice unions” in several major cities that submitted demands to their em-ployers, who were pressured by police agents into making concessions tothe workers. Initially, workers appeared to be rallying around the monar-chy in response to Zubatov’s enticements, but in July 1903 one of the po-lice unions was believed to have been the moving force behind a generalstrike in Odessa, the first work stoppage of such dimensions in Russia.Alarmed at this dangerous turn of events, the authorities dismissed Zu-batov and ended his experiment. But in 1904 the minister of internal af-fairs, Plehve, at a loss about how to defuse the protest movement of theworking class, permitted a priest in St. Petersburg, Father Georgii Gapon,to revive “police socialism”—with results far more explosive than thosein Odessa.

Because the working class played a critical role in the events of 1905and a party claiming to be its representative took power in 1917, schol-ars have taken great pains to recount the history of the Russian prole-tariat. Yet early in the twentieth century the empire was still predomi-nantly agrarian and peasants constituted well over 70 percent of thepopulation. They also nursed many grievances, though most were still de-voted to the tsar and considered him to be the only legitimate source ofpolitical authority. The peasants were convinced that the sovereign hadtheir interests at heart and was committed to providing for the people’sneeds; if only they could inform him about their grievances, the tsarwould overrule the landlords and officials, the source of all the peasants’miseries, and do his utmost to improve their lot. But by the early twenti-eth century there were increasing signs of peasant disaffection. In 1902,for example, major agrarian disturbance in Poltava and Kharkovprovinces suggested that a profound malaise had taken root in the coun-tryside. Still, it is noteworthy that even now peasants focused their at-tacks not on the autocrat or his officials but on the landlords, whom theyheld primarily responsible for frustrating the tsar’s will.

The principal cause of the peasants’ discontent was their economicplight, which had deteriorated steadily since their emancipation in 1861.Their average landholdings had declined more than 20 percent, tax bur-dens were extremely onerous, and productivity remained abysmally low,in large measure because the system of communal landownership, whichgoverned about four-fifths of the peasants’ holdings, was not conduciveto either long-range planning or to the application of modern farming.Many statistics could be cited to demonstrate the wretched conditions inthe countryside, but none is more telling than the following: the deathrate in Russia was almost double that in England.

In addition, peasants had to endure numerous other restrictions andburdens. The emancipation decree had freed them from serfdom, butthey still could not move freely from one place to another and in numer-ous ways remained at the mercy of local landlords. Officials could im-prison a peasant or exile him to Siberia without benefit of a trial; only in1903 did the government prohibit corporal punishment of convictedcriminals. After the counterreforms of the late 1880s the land captains,appointed by provincial governors, assumed a vast amount of arbitrarypower in the countryside. They could overrule decisions of local institu-tions, appoint personnel to important governmental positions, and orderthe imprisonment of a peasant for five days or impose a five-ruble fine onhim without resorting to judicial proceedings.

Peasant discontent was not the only sign of social stress in rural re-gions. After emancipation of the peasants, the dvorianstvo (nobility), ahighly diversified group, began to lose its grip economically and entereda period of decline as a social and political force. This was a matter ofconsiderable concern to the authorities because the nobles, constitutingabout 1.5 percent of the population, was the main prop of the autocracy.

The most striking manifestation of the nobility’s decline was its loss ofland. Unable or unwilling to administer their estates on a capitalist basis,many nobles sold their land to townsmen or peasants, surrendering in thefour decades, from 1861 to 1905, about one-third of their total holdings.To appreciate the magnitude of this development, it should be kept inmind that in the 1860s the privileged classes owned about one-half of allprivately held arable land.

At bottom, the nobles’ inability to turn their estates into profitableventures was rooted in their psychological disposition. Under the systemof serfdom, noble landlords had never been known for hard work, man-agerial skills, or frugality. Accustomed to receiving state handouts anddues as well as services from their serfs, many failed to develop the driveand initiative necessary for success in a market economy. The emancipa-tion of the serfs made matters worse. True, a fair number of noblesmoved into other fields of endeavor, but many of them found it evenharder to manage their estates profitably, for now they had to fend forthemselves under circumstances alien to their experience. Senior officialswere alarmed at the weakening of their major supporters, but they wereat a loss about how to reverse the trend.

In the political arena, two new forces made their appearance in the latenineteenth century, organized liberalism and radicalism, both aspiring tomass support. The autocracy made no effort to integrate either one of the



new groups into the body politic in any meaningful way, a neglect that,on the one hand, exacerbated tensions between the authorities and theopposition, and, on the other, impelled major groups within the opposi-tion to pay special attention to the vexing question of how they might co-operate in the struggle against the old order.

At the core of liberalism was the stress on individualism, the notionthat the freedom of the individual must be protected against arbitrary en-croachments by the state. Beyond that, there were important differencesamong Russian liberals, but all were critical of the bureaucracy and vir-tually all favored far-reaching limitations on the powers of the monarch.More specifically, liberals tended (again with significant variations) to fa-vor the rule of law, civil liberties, guarantees of private property, and thecreation of a legislative body with a voice in shaping the laws of the em-pire. Finally, until the turn of the century, the vast majority of them be-lieved that by peaceful agitation they would be able to persuade the tsarand the bureaucracy to introduce reforms along these lines.

The zemstvos, established shortly after the emancipation of the serfs,afforded public-spirited men, often from noble families, a suitable arenain which to pursue the general good. To be sure, their scope was limitedto such activities as charity, local education, health services, the buildingof roads and bridges, the maintenance of records, and the improvementof agricultural production, but the zemstvos were the only semipoliticalinstitution at least partly free from bureaucratic control. And within theircircumscribed sphere of competence, these local organs of self-govern-ment were remarkably effective, which accounts for the high hopesplaced on them by the intelligentsia, intellectuals who were passionatelyinterested in public issues and who played a critical role in underminingthe legitimacy of the tsarist regime. The technical experts employed bythe zemstvos—teachers, agronomists, engineers, statisticians, and doc-tors, generally referred to as the “third element,” numbering about sixty-five thousand early in the twentieth century—came to be a significantforce in the liberal movement. Toward the end of the nineteenth century,Russian liberalism also attracted the support of professional people notemployed by the zemstvos (professors, lawyers, writers, doctors, and en-gineers) as well of some members of the growing industrial and commer-cial classes. Liberalism became an organized force in 1903 with thefounding of the Soiuz osvobozhdeniia (Union of Liberation), an under-ground movement that included a sprinkling of moderate radicals. Itsprogram, adopted in October 1904, called for the liquidation of the au-tocracy, the establishment of a constitutional form of government, self-determination for the nationalities of the empire, and for economic andsocial reform.

The liberals’ success in building an impressive political movement isremarkable. Their main weapon was the pen, which they put to good usein the “thick journals” of opinion and in newspapers of very high quality.Censorship was a serious hindrance, but the regulations were looseenough to enable liberal journalists to express their views in generalterms often couched in Aesopian language.

The tasks of the opposition to autocracy were greatly complicated bythe fact that radicalism emerged as an organized force more or less at thesame time as liberalism. This dual development produced tensions that attimes weakened the camp hostile to the old order. Liberals focused on thedismantling of the autocratic system of rule, whereas the radicals insistedthat economic and social changes were no less urgent.

The intellectual roots of radicalism can be traced to Alexander Herzen(1812–70), who in the first half of the nineteenth century argued that thechances for socialism were much better in Russia than in the West be-cause the commune had accustomed the people to “communal life” andegalitarianism. The Russian peasant, Herzen contended, “has no moral-ity save that which flows instinctively, naturally, from his communism.”Although a professed revolutionary, Herzen believed, most vigorously to-ward the end of his life, that socialism could be attained by peacefulmeans.

Broadly speaking, it can be said that his ideas were adopted by the So-cialist Revolutionary Party that was founded in 1902 and that developedinto the largest socialist movement in Russia. The party’s official programadvocated the transfer of all land to peasant communes or local associa-tions, which in turn would assign it on an egalitarian basis to everyonewho wished to earn his living by farming. Industry would be similarly so-cialized. Although the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) insisted that the fi-nal goal, socialism, must be achieved by means of persuasion, they toler-ated the Combat Organization, an independent organ of the party thatcarried out dozens of political assassinations. Political terror, many SRsbelieved, was necessary to bring about the dismantling of the autocraticregime.

Another socialist movement, this one representing the working class,appeared in 1883 with the formation of a Russian Marxist association(the Group for the Emancipation of Labor, the forerunner of the SocialDemocratic Party). Its leading spokesman, G. V. Plekhanov, contendedthat the economic and political development of Russia would be similar,though not identical, to that of Western Europe. Russia would first un-dergo a bourgeois revolution, which would usher in the kind of politythat the liberals advocated; after an undetermined period of further in-dustrial growth, a second, proletarian, revolution would occur. But



whereas in Western Europe the proletariat had initially been a mere ap-pendage to the bourgeoisie in the struggles against the old regime, in Rus-sia it would constitute an independent political force during the first rev-olution and would even take the lead in the assault on tsarism.

It was not until 1900 that Marxism in Russia became a political move-ment of any consequence. That year V. I. Lenin began to publish a news-paper (Iskra) and to create an imposing network of illegal organizations.A strategist and tactician of revolution rather than a profound theorist,Lenin owed much of his success in creating a potent political movement(and later in making the first Marxist revolution) to his personal quali-ties: enormous drive, sincerity, self-assurance, modesty, and politicalsagacity. Still, the growth of the Russian Social Democratic WorkersParty (RSDWP) was slow; in 1905, there were only twelve thousand ac-tive Social Democrats in the empire, and most of them were not workers.This Marxist party, like every contemporary Russian political movement,was dominated by intellectuals, and its inner core consisted of professionalrevolutionaries, men and women dedicated full time to radical politics.

The Marxists faced a problem that had plagued radicals for a longtime and would be a perennial obstacle for them: the political inertia ofthe masses. Lenin addressed this issue in 1902 in one of his most cele-brated writings, What Is to Be Done?, a work that marked a departurefrom classical Marxism, which had insisted that capitalism and exploita-tion of the masses would inevitably transform workers into a class-con-scious proletariat committed to socialist revolution. Lenin abandonedthis deterministic view of the historical process by arguing that by itselfthe working class could never attain class consciousness. As a proponentof voluntarism, Lenin held that the “revolutionary socialist intelligentsia”must imbue the workers with class consciousness. Indeed, he went so faras to assert that workers should not be recruited en masse into the SocialDemocratic Party, which must be controlled by a small group of profes-sional revolutionaries. As he famously boasted, “Give us an organizationof revolutionists and we shall overturn Russia.” In short, Lenin main-tained that human initiative, not general economic forces, would be thedecisive factor in determining the political fate of the country.

At the Second Congress of the RSDWP in 1903, the party divided overprecisely this issue. Lenin introduced a motion that defined a party mem-ber as anyone who subscribed to the party’s program, gave it materialsupport, and took part in the work of one of its organizations. Iu. O.Martov, up to now one of Lenin’s close colleagues, wanted to substitutefor Lenin’s wording “personal participation in one of the party’s organi-zations” the phrase “regular personal support under the guidance of oneof [the party’s] organizations.” It seemed to be a minor difference, but it

soon became clear that whereas Lenin wanted a small party dominatedby a hierarchy of professionals, Martov and his supporters wanted theparty to be as broad as possible and to maintain the greatest possible de-gree of contact with the masses of workers. Although Lenin lost on thisissue by a vote of twenty-eight to twenty-one, he succeeded, by a series ofshrewd maneuvers, in winning a majority on other questions. He there-fore called his faction Bolsheviks (Majoritarians) and the oppositionMensheviks (Minoritarians), appellations that both groups accepted.

The differences between them did not prevent Bolsheviks and Men-sheviks from collaborating on several occasions during the turbulence of1904 and 1905, especially at the lower levels of the two organizations,which suggests a blurring of distinctions between them. Yet in his writ-ings of 1905 Lenin advanced ideas and tactics that in both tone and sub-stance increasingly turned Bolshevism into a movement with a distinctiveideological thrust. More stridently and consistently than other Marxists,he denounced the liberals for spinelessness, advocated an alliance be-tween the proletariat and the peasantry (which he now considered to bepotentially revolutionary), and urged his followers to prepare for anarmed uprising against the government.

In 1904, then, it can be said that three principal issues motivated the op-position to the old order. The first was the constitutional question: Howcould the anachronistic political structure of the empire be altered to in-troduce civil liberties and to assure a redistribution of power? The secondwas the labor question: How could the demands of the industrial prole-tariat for an improvement in its social and economic conditions be met?The third was the agrarian question: How could the land hunger of mil-lions of peasants be satisfied? Although the liberals, workers, and peas-ants constituted fairly distinct social groups, each of which emphasizedone of the three issues, by the spring of 1905 their agitation overlappedand brought on a social and political crisis that threatened to plunge thecountry into chaos. The government could restore stability only if it ad-dressed the aspirations of these protest movements, but the authoritieswere in a quandary, not only because they were reluctant to make anyconcessions at all, but also because they faced conflicting demands fromthe various sectors of the opposition.

To complicate matters further, the national issue also provoked dis-content among large sectors of the population. The Russian Empire, theaccretion of centuries of colonization, military conquest, and annexationby Muscovite rulers of weak principalities, comprised more than a hun-dred ethnic groups with a wide range of cultures, languages, and reli-



gions. The Great Russians claimed to be the dominant group and exertedparamount influence in politics, occupying most of the important posi-tions in the bureaucracy and military services. By the late nineteenth cen-tury, the authorities in St. Petersburg made plain their determination topreserve the hegemony of the Great Russians and even to increase theirinfluence by reducing to a minimum the cultural and political autonomyof the minorities. Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II embarked on a pol-icy of ruthless Russification not only to assert the supremacy of the GreatRussians but also for reasons of security. Heavily concentrated on theborderland, the minorities were considered a potential danger in time ofwar. In addition, the tsars feared that the special rights and privileges, cul-tural as well as political, enjoyed by some of the nationalities (notably theFinns and, to a much lesser extent, the Poles) would serve as a model forother minorities, among whom national consciousness was beginning totake root. If autonomy were widely extended, the empire would cease tobe a “unitary state,” to use the parlance of the time, and the autocrat’spower would be sharply curtailed.

The authorities in St. Petersburg were also motivated by sheer preju-dice. They considered the minorities to be culturally inferior, and theywere especially antagonistic toward the Jews, who numbered about fivemillion. Economic, legal, and social restrictions imposed on the Jewswere more extensive and demeaning than the measures taken againstother groups. Forced, with few exceptions, to live in the one region of theempire in the western and southwestern provinces known as the Pale ofSettlement, Jews also had to pay special taxes, could not attain the rankof officer in the army, and were almost completely excluded from em-ployment in the bureaucracy. The prominence of Jews in all the radicalmovements and, to a lesser extent, in the liberal movement was in largemeasure the fruit of the government’s discriminatory policies.

war and political upheaval

It is conceivable that had Russia not provoked Japan into war in 1904 arevolutionary upheaval might have been delayed and the country mighteven have avoided altogether a cataclysm as far-reaching as the events of1905. As it was, the catastrophic defeats suffered by the imperial armyand navy seemed to justify every criticism that the political oppositionhad leveled at the autocratic regime: that it was irresponsible, incompe-tent, and reckless.

The war between Russia and Japan did not result from fundamental

conflicts over national interests. Nor is it true, as is often claimed, thatthe minister of internal affairs Plehve urged his government to embarkon hostilities because he believed that “in order to prevent revolution, weneed a small victorious war.” The basic cause of the war lies in the im-prudent policies of expansionism in the Far East that were pursued byvarious senior officials and influential men at court. For some time, theRussian government had adopted a forward policy in the Far East, butthe idea was to promote economic exploitation of an area rich in re-sources and markets, not to make war on Japan, which was also inter-ested in economic expansion and had extended its influence over Korea.When a Russian speculator and adventurer, A. M. Bezobrazov, unex-pectedly received a concession from the Korean government to cut tim-ber on the Yalu and Tumen rivers, the Japanese government becamealarmed because this threatened its long-range plans of expansion. Toavoid conflict, the Japanese proposed an arrangement whereby Russiawould be granted predominance in Manchuria in return for Japan’s pre-dominance in Korea. In January 1904 Tokyo pressed for a speedy replyto its proposal. Neither Tsar Nicholas nor his chief ministers wanted togo to war, but the monarch was too weak to resist the importunities ofBezobrazov and some other reckless men not to yield to Japan’s over-tures for compromise. Not receiving any reply to their proposal, theJapanese on January 26 launched a surprise attack on Russian ships atPort Arthur and Chemulpo.

One reason for the highhandedness of Russia’s conduct was that noone in St. Petersburg believed that the Japanese could mount a sustainedmilitary campaign against their country. On every count—the size of itspopulation, army, navy, annual budget, or gold reserves—the advantageseemed to lie with Russia. However, it soon turned out that these claimsof superiority were thoroughly misleading. For one thing, Russian forceswere scattered over a vast area of the Far East, and reinforcements fromthe west had to be transported piecemeal, since the roadbed of the Trans-Siberian Railroad was not sturdy enough to bear heavy traffic. Even moreserious, the railway still had a gap of more than 100 miles at Lake Baikal,where the line needed to be constructed around the lake in very moun-tainous terrain. No immediate help could be expected from the Russiannavy, much of which was stationed in Europe and under the best of cir-cumstances could not reach the theater of operations for many months.

Japan enjoyed other advantages. Its troops and naval forces were bet-ter trained and its intelligence more effective than Russia’s. In one blowon January 26, 1904, the Japanese managed to put out of action overhalf the Russian fleet in the Yellow Sea, while suffering very minorlosses. Within a few weeks, the Japanese landed troops in Chemulpo



and strengthened their forces in Korea, which proceeded to drive theRussian outposts back beyond the Yalu River. Though surprised by theattack and indignant at Japan’s treachery, Tsar Nicholas and his closestcounselors were at first not particularly apprehensive. They believed thatthe Japanese victories amounted to a “mere episode” and that soon theRussian military would succeed in repelling the enemy forces. The publicthroughout the country rallied to the government’s support. Even a manof thoroughly moderate views, Prince S. N. Trubetskoi, a professor ofphilosophy at Moscow University, was momentarily carried away by pa-triotic fervor. He contended that Russia was defending all of Europeagainst the “yellow danger, the new hordes of Mongols armed with mod-ern . . . technology.” Only a few men on the far left unequivocally de-nounced the adventurism of the tsarist regime and gleefully predictedRussia’s defeat.

But within a few months public opinion changed dramatically. Theearly retreats of Russian forces could be rationalized as tactical moves toimprove positions, but as the war continued to go badly for Russia, andthe defeats became more spectacular, the mood in Russian society beganto turn sour. As early as the spring of 1904, the patriotic Prince Trubet-skoi was alarmed by the turn of events and warned that “Russia couldsurvive only if her government agreed to reforms.” General M. I. Drago-manov, a retired, highly respected soldier openly blamed the militaryservices and the government for Russia’s plight. “As is known,” he wasfond of saying, “fish always begin to stink in their heads; is it any wonderthat the army is incapable of fighting the Japanese?”

Military humiliations were only one reason for the opposition to thewar. The war also debilitated the economy, which was in the early stateof recovery after a prolonged slump. Usually, wars tend to stimulate eco-nomic activity, and railway construction, arms factories, shipbuilding,and the metallurgical and mining industries did benefit in 1904 from thegrowth in government orders. But the decision by the Trans-SiberianRailway to transport only military goods adversely affected some impor-tant sectors of the national economy. The production of silk goods, forexample, declined by more than 25 percent in 1904; that of woolengoods by about 15 percent; that of cotton goods, chemicals, and someother industrial products by a smaller, but nevertheless significant, per-centage. Moreover, the call to arms of about 1.2 million reservists, oftenthe most productive workers, reduced output in the handicraft industries.This caused a curtailment of seasonal work, an important source of in-come for many peasants. Not infrequently, peasants were obliged to sellgrain to pay their taxes even though their supplies were barely adequatefor their own consumption.

A totally unpredictable event in the summer of 1904, the assassinationof Plehve, the minister of internal affairs, by a Socialist Revolutionaryterrorist, was in several ways a turning point in the evolution of the pub-lic mood. The elimination of the most dynamic and reactionary figure inthe government both exposed the depth of despair over the state of af-fairs and opened up new possibilities for agitation against the war andthe government. Virtually no public figure expressed regret over the mur-der, and Count V. N. Lamsdorff, the minister of foreign affairs, let it beknown that he was relieved not to have to deal with so “uncongenial acolleague” as Plehve. Public apathy toward the government’s struggleagainst the opposition became more evident and increasingly peoplevoiced criticism of the government and even of the tsar. To contemporaryobservers, it now seemed that the autocracy’s popular support was ex-ceedingly fragile, a precondition for the eruption of a political storm.

It took Tsar Nicholas more than a month to decide on Plehve’s succes-sor. Nicholas was inclined to appoint a man committed to Plehve’s hard-line policies, but in the end he heeded the advice of officials who urgedhim to make a conciliatory gesture to calm the increasingly vocal opposi-tion. On August 26, he announced the appointment of Prince P. D. Svi-atopolk-Mirsky as minister of internal affairs. A forty-seven-year-old bu-reaucrat who had occupied several important posts, Mirsky was knownto have expressed enlightened political views and was widely respectedfor his intelligence and integrity. He quickly made clear that he favoredreconciliation between the government and society and that he woulddistinguish between revolutionaries and people who were loyal subjectsbut opposed the arbitrariness of the administration. More important, hecommitted himself to a series of reforms, such as granting additionalpowers to the zemstvos, reducing restrictions on the press, and the pur-suit of more enlightened policies toward national minorities. He did notfeel competent to make specific recommendations on the vexing agrarianquestion, but he vowed to study it and to propose reforms. He wasted notime in dismissing several of the more notorious hard-liners from theMinistry of Internal Affairs and in declaring that it was his aim to act onthe basis of the “principle of confidence.” Although people on the leftand the right criticized Mirsky’s first steps as either too timid or too rad-ical, the dominant reaction was positive. But an equally notable reactionto Mirky’s early pronouncements was an increase in public criticism ofthe government.

Historical analogies are always somewhat misleading, but the situa-tion in Russia in the fall of 1904 may be compared roughly to that inFrance in the second half of 1788. Just as King Louis XVI’s decision toconvoke the Estates-General opened the dikes to a national movement



against the old order, so Tsar Nicholas’s inauguration of moderate re-forms in mid-1904 unleashed a wave of oppositional activity against theautocracy. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to suggest that it was during thelast four months of 1904 and not in January 1905, as is widely believed,that the Revolution of 1905 began.

The trouble was that Mirsky’s reforms, though welcome, did little torestore calm in society. Too paltry to satisfy fully the opposition, theywere sufficiently innovative to suggest that the authorities were too weakto resist the growing pressure for change. As a consequence, the liberalsdecided to put the new minister of internal affairs to the test by conven-ing a zemstvo congress in St. Petersburg early in November. The govern-ment was expected to prohibit this meeting, whose organizers had madeclear their intention to take up political issues that transcended local mat-ters, legally the only area of competence of zemstvos. But after some hes-itation, Mirsky indicated that he would order the police to “wink” at theproceedings so long as the delegates met in private quarters “for a cup oftea.” At the same time, he ordered officials to suppress all news about thecongress, though he himself wanted to be informed about the outcome ofthe discussions. The government was playing games, but there could beno doubt that it no longer felt strong enough or self-confident enough toprevent the opposition from organizing and making its views known.And despite the news blackout, politically sophisticated people generallyknew that the zemstvo representatives were meeting in the capital. Morethan five thousand telegrams from all over the empire arrived at the con-gress urging the delegates to press for fundamental changes in the “un-bearable” state of affairs. Soon major newspapers ignored governmentrestrictions and published reports on the congress. The wall of censorshipwas now widely pierced.

After extensive discussion, the 103 delegates overwhelmingly voted fora ten-point resolution that called for a fundamental reordering of Russia’sinstitutions, though there was some opposition to the tenth point. Thefirst nine points condemned the prevailing state system as “abnormal”and “arbitrary” and proposed that officials be placed under the law andthat the government grant civil liberties and abandon the “estate princi-ple” in the election of deputies to local organs of self-government, whichassigned an inordinate proportion of deputies to the gentry, merchants,and clergy. Such organs, moreover, should be established in all regions ofthe empire. These points alone were far-reaching, but most delegateswished to go further and supported the demand in Point 10 for a popularrepresentative body that would participate fully in running the affairs ofstate. D. N. Shipov, a zemstvo activist ever sine the 1890s who waswidely respected as a responsible and thoroughly decent person, balked.

Devoted to the monarchy, he upheld the Slavophile conception of theRussian polity. He stressed that the Russian people were basically differ-ent from Western Europeans. Russians were good-natured, patient, mod-est in their needs, religious, and full of love. Developing the Slavophiletheme of the 1840s—“For the people, opinions; for the Tsar, authority”—Shipov argued that Russia did not need formal arrangements, spelled outon paper, defining the relationship between the sovereign and the people.That relationship was based on moral principles and moral laws, the onlykind that were truly effective. According to Shipov, the principal cause ofRussia’s plight was the arbitrariness of the bureaucracy, which had sepa-rated the tsar from the people. He favored a popular body of representa-tives, but one that would be limited to consultative functions.

For most delegates at the congress that was unacceptable, but they didnot want to offend the venerable Shipov. Point 10 of the resolution there-fore included Shipov’s proposal as well as the majority’s proposal thatcalled for a parliament with real powers to legislate. In another conces-sion to Shipov and his small number of supporters, the resolution did notcontain the word “constitution,” which was anathema to the authorities.But none of these affected the significance of the congress. Everyone whofollowed its proceedings knew that for the first time an overwhelmingmajority of zemstvo activists at a public meeting had demanded a consti-tution. By all accounts, the congress, having defied the bureaucrats, madean enormous impression on society and boosted the confidence of the op-position. It was now clear that “not everything that was prohibited wasin fact unfeasible.”

The minister of internal affairs met privately with Shipov to learn ofthe congress’s decisions. Surprisingly, Mirsky expressed sympathy for theresolution, asked for suggestions on how it might be implemented, andpromised to pass it on to the tsar. It seemed to the liberals that the gov-ernment was prepared to push ahead with its reformist policies. Theyalso believed that to maintain momentum it was critical to keep up thepressure on the authorities.

The liberals now took the offensive in local organs of self-government,seeking their support for resolutions favoring major political reform. Thiswas not easy. Unlike the congress in Petersburg, the local bodies were of-ficial institutions with strict limitations on the issues they could discuss.Moreover, zemstvo assemblies were chaired by provincial marshals of thenobility, often men with conservative views. In any case, in many of theassemblies constitutionalists did not enjoy the support of the majority ofthe deputies, which meant that resolutions had to be watered down to se-cure their passage. Also, the central government increasingly intervenedat the local level to prevent the adoption of resolutions it considered un-



acceptable. It is thus extraordinary that the liberals secured as much sup-port as they did in the country at large.

Approximately one-third of the thirty-four provincial zemstvo assem-blies adopted resolutions echoing the ones passed at the November con-gress in St. Petersburg. City councils in various localities also joined thecampaign. Then, in the months from October 1904 to January 1905, sev-eral groups of industrial and financial leaders issued calls for political re-form. At about the same time, some forty-two scholarly, cultural, andprofessional societies held meetings to press for changes in the politicalsystem. But none of the manifestations of support for liberal goals couldmatch in scope, drama, and effectiveness the banquet campaign that be-gan on November 5, 1904, and ended on January 8, 1905.

The Union of Liberation had initially thought of launching such a cam-paign on February 19, 1904, to celebrate the anniversary of the emanci-pation of the serfs, but the wave of patriotism after the outbreak of warmade such a demonstration of opposition to the government inadvisable.By the fall, however, the national mood had changed, prompting the lib-erals to resurrect their earlier plan. Modeled on the famous banquets inParis in 1847–48, the events were intended to unite the intelligentsia“around the constitutional banner.” Local liberals were urged to organizebanquets in honor of the fortieth anniversary of the judicial reforms. Theauthorities were, as always, reluctant to permit the meetings, but in theend they relented, on the understanding that all the gatherings would be“private.”

The rash of political meetings that ensued was unprecedented in Rus-sian history. Never before had so many citizens, most of them from theeducated classes, joined to give vent to their profound unhappiness withthe state of affairs. Even some Social Democrats were sufficiently im-pressed to urge their followers to participate in the banquets. In severalcities, Social Democrats attempted to drive the liberals to the left by stag-ing street demonstrations and by delivering speeches in the meeting halls.

In all, thirty-eight banquets were held in twenty-six cities. Zemstvo ac-tivists (physicians, lawyers, engineers, and “third-element” people) werethe most prominent participants, but some local bureaucrats, nobles,journalists, and teachers also took part. The banquets adopted variouskinds of resolutions, but to one degree or another all contributed to mo-bilizing support for the demands of liberals. Although the banquets were“private” affairs, several major newspapers described most of them in de-tail, thus publicizing the demands of the opposition.

Students at institutions of higher learning added their voice to theprotest movement in the fall of 1904. As early as October 11, a groupmeeting at the Polytechnical Institute expressed its lack of confidence in

the government and demanded an “end to the war and the convocationof a constituent assembly on the basis of universal suffrage.” In the nexttwo months, similar meetings were held at other institutions of higherlearning in the capital and in Moscow, Kharkov, Odessa, and Kiev. Atone demonstration, on November 28 in St. Petersburg, the police chargedthe crowd and beat students cruelly, but on the whole the zemstvo cam-paign proceeded peacefully.

The various campaigns by Russian liberals in the fall and winter of1904 created a new political climate in Russia. Some important new or-ganizations, such as the Physicians’ Union, the Academic Union, and theEngineers’ Union, were formed; these served as the precursors to the in-fluential Union of Unions organized in May 1905. It was all very bewil-dering, both for the people enjoying a degree of freedom unheard of inRussia and for the authorities unused to hearing so much criticism oftheir conduct. “Men,” according to one observer, “say many things theywould have gone to Siberia for six months ago. The papers print the mostrabid attacks against the bureaucracy, the war, and the government.” Thecritical question now was: How would the authorities handle the fermentthat had gripped the people?

Sometime in the fall, Tsar Nicholas concluded that further conciliatorygestures were needed to pacify the country. But he now ignored Mirsky,who favored a fairly bold move, the establishment of an institution com-posed of elected deputies that would participate in legislative work.Nicholas turned instead to Witte, who was opposed to any far-reachingconstitutional changes and proposed, instead, the issuance of a ukase (de-cree) promising some rather minor reforms. On hearing the news of thetsar’s decision, Mirksy lost heart. “Everything has failed,” he said tosome colleagues. “Let us build jails.” He offered to resign as minister ofinternal affairs, but the tsar prevailed on him to remain in office. It wouldbe difficult to prove that Mirsky’s modest proposal would have satisfiedsociety and ended the political storm. But its rejection signified beyondany doubt that the government’s attitude toward the demands of the op-position had not fundamentally changed. Support for the beleaguered au-tocracy within society dwindled dramatically, and for that reason alone,Nicholas’s decision to follow Witte’s advice must be classed among themost critical ones of his reign.

Witte’s ukase, which was signed by the tsar on December 12, an-nounced that the government intended to propose legislation extending tothe peasants rights equal to those enjoyed by other subjects. It also prom-ised that the Committee of Ministers under the chairmanship of Wittewould prepare legislation to eliminate arbitrariness in the application ofthe law, extend the authority of zemstvos, establish a system of insurance



for industrial workers, impose limitations on the application of emer-gency measures, provide for greater toleration of religious dissenters, andease restrictions on the press. Witte had persuaded himself that this de-cree would be welcomed by society, but in fact liberals found the meas-ure totally inadequate. Not only did it merely promise reforms, and mod-est ones at that, but also it was accompanied by a reassertion of theprinciple of autocracy. In addition, the authorities disregarded the spiritof the decree by launching a new campaign of repression, which includeda tightening of the censorship over the press, dismissal of moderates fromstate service, and the imposition of new limitations on local organs ofgovernment.

Liberals immediately warned the government that the decree wouldfurther enrage the opposition, and one of their leaders, P. B. Struve, urgedhis colleagues to “make ever tighter the ring of blockade around the au-tocracy.” Rebuffed by the opposition, the government also managed toconfuse their own supporters with further displays of ineptitude in copingwith the growing unrest. The senior police official in Kharkov, for exam-ple, was at a loss about how to respond to the agitation by liberals becausehe received no instructions from the government. Within a month of theissuance of the ukase of December 12 the ineptitude of senior officials be-came even more startling as they attempted to cope with unrest involvingnot simply liberals but masses of people in most of the empire’s cities.

gapon and bloody sunday

Inexplicably, a development more threatening in the near term to theregime than the agitation for reform by liberals received scant attentionfrom the authorities. That was the impact of the liberal campaign in thefall and winter of 1904 on a growing number of worker-activists. A fairnumber of them were deeply impressed by the outpouring of petitions,which they read with great interest and which prompted them to considerproducing their own petitions. Perhaps more important, a leader of theSt. Petersburg workers at this time and a key figure in the unfolding ofthe revolution, Father Georgii Apollonovich Gapon, established contactwith several members of the local branch of the Union of Liberation, whosupplied him with newspapers and information on the liberal movement.The Liberationists also made serious efforts to persuade workers to agi-tate for both economic improvements for themselves and for politicalconcessions that the Union of Liberation considered to be of paramountimportance.

Actually, by the time of the liberal offensive the workers of St. Peters-burg had already developed on their own an impressive organization un-der the leadership of Father Gapon, who was as charismatic as he wasenigmatic. Some contemporaries denounced him as a “thorough-pacedrevolutionist” who “utterly deceived” workers into believing he had theirinterests at heart; others claimed that the “Jewish press” had elevatedhim to the level of a “historical figure,” whereas he was in reality a de-praved man who had violated a girl twelve years of age; still othersviewed him as nothing but a toady of the tsarist secret police. About theonly judgment on Gapon on which his associates, contemporary ob-servers, and historians can agree is that he was influential in triggering thesecond phase—the most turbulent and violent phase—of the revolution.

Remarkably, each one of the divergent assessments contains a grain oftruth. Gapon was a man of extraordinary abilities and charm, driven byan urge to make his mark in the world by serving a noble cause, but asthe twists and turns in his career demonstrate, he was not always scrupu-lous in the means he used to achieve his ambition. Born in 1870 in thesmall village of Beliki in Poltava Province into a family of modest means,Gapon was very much influenced by his mother and grandmother, bothof them extremely pious. He was an intelligent child, spent an inordinateamount of time praying to the icons in his home, and after excelling inprimary school he followed the advice of his priest that he continue hiseducation at the Lower Ecclesiastical School in Poltava. After graduation,Gapon entered the Poltava Seminary, but at some point he lost interest inthe priesthood as a profession. He was distressed by the church’s empha-sis on ritual, its “religious formalism,” and the hypocrisy and corruptionof the clergy. At the same time, exposure to people in dismal povertydeeply stirred his sympathies, and after recovering from two serious ill-nesses (a nervous disorder and typhus), Gapon decided that he preferredworking among the “toiling and suffering classes” to the priesthood.

When he failed to gain admission to a university to complete his stud-ies, Gapon worked briefly as a statistician for the Poltava administration.In that position he came into further contact with the poor, making himeven more eager to serve them. His wife, also a very pious person, per-suaded him to enter the priesthood after all, because, in her view, as aman of God he would be better placed to pursue his interests. For a fewyears Gapon served with great satisfaction and success as a “spiritualleader” in Poltava, and he was also very happy with his wife and twochildren. This period came to a tragic end when his wife contracted a se-rious illness and died, a loss that deeply affected Gapon. Gapon becamesomething of a mystic, claiming to have visions, and in 1898 he enteredthe St. Petersburg Theological Seminary for further religious studies.



Within a year, however, he again suffered from a nervous disorder and ina state of almost total collapse went to the Crimea to recuperate. Therehis future career was decided when he fell in with some intellectuals whoreinforced his doubts about the “formalism and hypocrisy” of the churchand convinced him to abandon religious work for his other interests.

By all accounts, Gapon was an imposing man. Handsome, intelligent,and articulate, he impressed acquaintances with his deep dedication tohumane principles and his loyalty to his associates. He was a fine speaker,and, when it served his interests, he could be crafty and even duplicitous.When he returned to St. Petersburg after recovering from his nervouscondition, he resumed his studies but also worked again among thedowntrodden and attracted many people to his religious services and thevarious discussions he organized. His numerous schemes to help the poorcame to the attention of the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, who urgedthe Committee of Ministers to take an interest in his work and to invitehim to one of its meetings. Gapon now considered himself to be a mandestined for great achievements in improving the moral and materialcondition of the common people. He also had developed a strong faith inthe tsar’s devotion to the well-being of the Russian people, especiallythose at the lowest rung of society.

Sometime in 1902 or early 1903, Gapon seized on a new opportunityto enlarge his influence among St. Petersburg workers. He was intriguedby the elaborate scheme of Zubatov, chief of the Moscow Okhrana, tomobilize mass support for the tsar. For his part, Zubatov was eager to en-list the services of a man with Gapon’s appeal to workers. A localokhrana agent arranged a meeting between the two men, and althoughGapon disapproved of Zubatov’s stress on tight police control over work-ers’ unions, they reached an understanding. Zubatov began to send thepriest a monthly subsidy of one hundred rubles (a substantial sum at thetime), and in the summer of 1903 Gapon founded the Assembly of theRussian Factory and Mill Workers of the City of St. Petersburg. He hadsecured Zubatov’s agreement to minimize police involvement in the or-ganization as well as to allow members to play a more active role in de-termining its work than had been the case in other police unions. The as-sembly did not intervene in labor disputes, concentrating instead onorganizing dances, concerts, and lectures, and on promoting variousother projects for self-improvement. Gapon deliberately restricted the as-sembly to activities that were politically innocuous because he plannedeventually to expand the organization, both in the capital and in othercities, and wanted to avoid any action that might appear provocative orthreatening to the authorities. He was astonishingly skillful and cunningin retaining the confidence both of his lieutenants in the assembly, some

of whom were much more militant than he on the labor question, and ofhigh officials in St. Petersburg. He himself, it seems, continued to believein the tsar’s benevolence and in his willingness to grant constitutionalrights to the people.

Yet as early as March 1904 he showed four leaders of the assembly adocument he had drafted containing demands that he then knew to beanathema to the tsar and most of his advisers. Among other things, thedocument called for political rights for the Russian people, an eight-hourworkday, and the right of workers to form trade unions. Gapon swore hisassociates to secrecy about the document, but in informing them of hisultimate intentions, if that is really what they were, he strengthened hishold on their loyalty. Gapon’s true convictions and intentions remainsomething of a mystery. Conceivably, he himself had not yet sorted outhis beliefs and plans and still held contradictory views on the autocracy,which would be consistent with his mercurial character. He cherishedgreat ideals and great ambitions, but beyond that he lacked clarity ofpurpose.

Gapon’s organizational skills were outstanding. One hundred and fiftypeople attended the opening ceremony of his assembly on April 11, 1904;within five months he had established a total of nine branches with a to-tal membership of five thousand, and the estimates of the assembly’smembership in January 1905 range from six to twenty thousand. Hemade a point of enlisting women, arguing to subordinates that if theywere not drawn into the movement, women would hinder men’s work.No event could be scheduled without Gapon’s personal approval. His au-thority was so great that some of his assistants referred to him as “dicta-tor,” an appellation he rather savored. Intellectuals were wary of him, inpart because he was not a cultivated man. Moreover, he lacked theoreti-cal sophistication and was ignorant of the history of radicalism. But noneof these deficiencies reduced his appeal to workers. On the contrary, theyliked the fact that he was, socially, of their class, did not talk down tothem, treated them as comrades—in short, that he acted and spoke asthey did. Although workers under the influence of revolutionary move-ments distrusted him, there is no question that he had “cast a spell” overlarge numbers of common laborers and that his adherents were preparedto “march with him through fire and water.”

Late in 1904, when the liberal movement was moving into high gear,Gapon intensified his efforts to turn the assembly into a powerful organ-ization. He went so far as to hold secret discussions with several of his as-sociates on the desirability of drafting a petition, possibly containing po-litical demands, that would be submitted to the tsar on the occasion of anew military defeat or perhaps on February 19, to commemorate the



emancipation of the serfs in 1861. But a series of unexpected events at thePutilov plant, a large armaments and shipbuilding factory in the south-western section of St. Petersburg, led Gapon to change the timing and tosome extent the focus of the petition. Many workers at the plant be-longed to the assembly and when, in December 1904, four of them werearbitrarily dismissed by the director, S. I. Smirnov, who had displayedstrong hostility toward Gapon’s organization, open conflict seemed in-evitable. At first, Gapon thought that the issue could be settled amicably,but the administration of the factory refused to reinstate the four work-ers, who, in fact, did not have a strong case since they were neither in-dustrious nor reliable. Gapon concluded that he had to insist on their re-instatement to retain the prestige of the assembly among the membershipand among workers in general. On January 3 the workers at the Putilovplant decided to go on strike, which Gapon immediately supported. Thestrike spread to other factories with remarkable speed, which suggeststhat the dismissals were only the spark that ignited the flame. By January7, about two-thirds of St. Petersburg’s factory force—some one hundredthousand people at 382 enterprises—had stopped working.

The workers initially focused on economic issues, but to maximizetheir support they quickly began to voice political demands. Gaponwasted no time in exploiting the mood of militancy; on January 5, heraised the question of preparing a petition to be presented to the tsar bya large, peaceful procession through the streets of St. Petersburg. Gaponinformed the city governor of his intentions, and neither he nor any otherofficial tried to deter the priest from his scheme, which turned into themost momentous event of the revolution, known in history as BloodySunday.

For three days Gapon worked endlessly to organize the procession, tobe held on Sunday, January 9. On one day alone he delivered fifty shortspeeches to workers, always exuding unbounded confidence in his plans.Generally, he told his audiences that the tsar was a good man who wouldhelp the people once he understood their plight. But occasionally he ac-knowledged the possibility of failure, in which case it would be evidentthat “we have no tsar.” Workers responded enthusiastically to hisspeeches and indicated that they considered their demands to be nothingless than sacred: when votes were taken on specific points to be includedin the petition they would signal their approval by making a cross withtheir fingers. Both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, who prided them-selves on their class-consciousness, disapproved of the procession on thegrounds that the assembly’s demands did not put sufficient stress on po-litical demands. As a consequence, the Social Democrats exerted virtuallyno influence on the events leading up to Bloody Sunday.

The authorities appeared to be confused and failed to give clear signalsabout their intentions. Rumors circulated that the army had been placedon alert, but there were also various hints that no action would be takento hinder the procession. A few policemen actually attended some meet-ings of the assembly’s branches without interfering in any way. Some ofthe event’s organizers managed to convince themselves that the tsar in-tended to invite forty to sixty workers elected by the people to attend a“gala entertainment” at the Winter Palace. Only at the last minute didseveral prominent citizens become apprehensive, prompting them tomake efforts to forestall any untoward incidents. On Saturday evening,January 8, I. V. Gessen, a prominent liberal, visited Witte and pleadedwith him to persuade officials not to order the army to block the proces-sion. Gessen warned that workers were at such a high pitch of emotionthat if the army tried to stop them there would be a bloodbath. Witte re-ceived Gessen rather coolly, stressing his lack of influence at court. Otherappeals for restraint also failed to impress the authorities, who had con-cluded that to yield to the demands of people demonstrating in the streetswould inevitably open the door to disorder on a massive scale and wouldundermine the autocratic regime. Although it should be noted that thereis no evidence that the tsar and his advisers wanted a violent confronta-tion, by January 7 the government had reached two operational decisionsthat made a clash unavoidable: (1) not to grant Gapon a meeting with thetsar to present the petition and (2) not to permit marching workers to en-ter the center of the city. Troops were now brought in from various re-gions to reinforce the local garrison, and by January 9 about nine thou-sand infantrymen and three thousand cavalry were held in readiness inthe capital. Callousness and mindlessness rather than malice were theguiding principles of the authorities at this critical moment.

Gapon made a last ditch effort to assure a peaceful procession. Theevening before the march he sent a formal letter to the Ministry of Inter-nal Affairs requesting a meeting with the tsar at the Winter Palace at 2 pmthe next day to present the petition. Gapon assured the minister thatthere was no reason to fear the marchers, whose only interest was to fur-ther “the well-being of our country.” “Tell the Tsar,” Gapon continued,“that I, the workers, and many thousands of subjects have reached theunalterable decision to come peacefully and with faith in Him to the Win-ter Palace.” The petition itself was, in fact, a desperate plea to the tsar,still referred to as “the father,” to treat his subjects not as slaves but ashuman beings and to institute the necessary reforms from above becausesuch were the dictates of compassion. Significantly, the petition blamedthe people’s agonies not on the sovereign but on the bureaucracy, whichwas accused of robbing “the government and the people” and of having“devastated the country.”



Although in tone the petition was moderate, its demands were quiteradical. It called for a constituent assembly elected on the basis of a dem-ocratic suffrage, civil liberties for all subjects, equality of all before thelaw, the right to establish trade unions, and an eight-hour working day,all demands that aligned Gapon’s movement with the political oppositionthat had become active in 1904. The petition, it is worth emphasizing,did not demand the abolition of the monarchy or the introduction of so-cialism. Nor did it contain threats of violence. The commission of sevenlawyers set up on January 16 to investigate the events surroundingBloody Sunday was right to stress that the march was “nothing otherthan a religious procession.” A foreign observer was also right in notingthat had police conduct been efficient and restrained, the crowds couldhave been handled without resort to “extreme measures.”

Early on January 9 somewhere between fifty and one hundred thou-sand people appeared in their Sunday best at designated places. Manywomen and children showed up, and all participated in prayer meetingsheld before the procession began. Marchers carried icons and portraits ofthe tsar and sang “Save Thy People, O Lord” and other hymns. Manyworkers pointedly raised their hands and emptied their pockets to showthat they were unarmed. In the words of the lawyers’ report, the people“went like children to weep out their grief on their father’s breast.” Asthe crowds approached their destination, soldiers in a few places told themarchers to turn back, but this was not the case everywhere. The au-thorities seem not to have formulated a clear-cut pattern of action.

The marchers did not heed the orders to disperse. When one largecrowd that included Gapon, who was surrounded by a protective shieldof workers, reached the Narva Gate, a bugle was blown as a signal to thesoldiers to open fire. The workers would have understood the meaning ofthe bugle call, but no one could hear anything over the din of the singing.Moreover, virtually no time elapsed between the signal and the shooting.Some forty people were immediately killed or wounded. Gapon escapedinjury, though two of his bodyguards and an official of the assembly diedon the spot. Several other bodyguards threw Gapon over a fence, and thepriest then hid in different private apartments, including that of thewriter Maxim Gorky. Enraged by the violence, Gapon exclaimed, “Thereis no God any longer! There is no Tsar!”

Shooting erupted at other places where marchers refused to retreat,and when the carnage ended some 130 people had been killed and 299had been seriously wounded. The fury of the people in the streets was un-controllable. Many were heard to shout: “Murderers! Bloodsuckers!Hangmen! You run from the Japanese, but shoot your own people.”

The day that immediately came to be known as Bloody Sunday couldhardly have ended more disastrously. An occasion that the government

could have exploited to its advantage became instead a rallying cry forthe opposition. Had Tsar Nicholas, who did not even bother to be at theWinter Palace, received a delegation and announced some concessionssuch as the reduction of the working day, he would have earned, as oneforeign observer noted, “the admiration and undying loyalty of the work-ingmen.” Instead, the massacre electrified public opinion throughout theempire and cost the tsar the affection of masses of people. Within hoursof the catastrophe, meetings were held to denounce the government andto collect funds for the families of the victims. Within a few days zem-stvos adopted resolutions more radical than the resolution of the Zem-stvo Congress of November 1904.

But the most disruptive development and the one that the governmentfound most difficult to handle was the vast strike movement that eruptedin the country. On January 10, some 160,000 workers stayed away fromtheir jobs in St. Petersburg. Very quickly, the strike movement spread toMoscow, Riga, Warsaw, Vilna, Kovno, Tiflis, Baku, Batum, and the Balticprovinces, to mention only the major regions affected by the unrest. Alltold, some 414,000 people within the empire participated in the workstoppage during the month of January 1905. Bloody Sunday activatedthe working class to a degree unprecedented in Russian history.

Serious disorder also erupted at institutions of higher learning, whichfor some time had been centers of oppositional agitation. Students at oneschool after another staged strikes, often after tumultuous meetings andwith the support of many professors. To a lesser but nonetheless signifi-cant extent, students at secondary schools also stayed away from classand joined street demonstrations.

Even in conservative circles only a few voices could be heard in de-fense of the government’s handling of the procession. Some unknown or-ganization or group of rightists made a feeble attempt to put the blamefor the disorder on Anglo-Japanese agitation. Placards appearing inMoscow and Libava (Latvia) alleged that English and Japanese agitatorsprovoked disturbances in order to delay the departure of the Baltic andBlack Sea fleets to the Far East. The charge was so preposterous that assoon as the British protested the Russian government issued an officialdenial of the charge. But this denial did little to counter the widespreadcriticism of the behavior of the Russian authorities on January 9. Russia’simage in the West, never exactly benign, plummeted to its lowest depth.

The tsarist government’s most critical task was to halt the spread ofdisorder within Russia. As usual, it alternated between repression andheavy-handed attempts at reconciliation. On the one hand, on January 10the Ministry of Internal Affairs sent instructions to officials in 194 citiesrecommending “decisive measures” to quell “strikes and disorders.” InSt. Petersburg the authorities closed down all branches of Gapon’s or-



ganization and asked factory owners to supply lists of unreliable work-ers, who were to be exiled. On the other hand, the government sought toconciliate the workers, but resorted to a clumsy gesture that completelymisfired. On January 19, Tsar Nicholas received a delegation of thirty-four workers, all of them chosen by factory managers and police officialsbecause the workers themselves refused to make the selection. Mindlessly,the tsar told his visitors that during the recent troubles the workers of St.Petersburg had been misled by “traitors and enemies of our country.”Nevertheless, he offered his forgiveness and donated fifty thousand rublesfor the families of the victims of the bloodshed, without acknowledging,however, that he or his officials had had been guilty of any wrongdoing.The entire opposition was enraged and all the newspapers decided that itwas the better part of wisdom not to print any comment at all on theworkers’ reception at court.

Still, a few concessions were made to workers shortly after BloodySunday. Industrialists gave some “grants” to workers who had been outon strike, agreed to the election of workers’ representatives to negotiatewith their employers, raised pay rates, and set limitation on fines imposedon delinquent workers. Also, on January 19 the government established acommission, under the chairmanship of N. V. Shidlovsky, to examine thecauses of the worker’s discontent and to recommend measures to preventfuture disturbances.

Gapon, who had played a key role in stoking the upheaval that spreadacross the Russian Empire, now became a rather pathetic figure withoutany influence on the future course of the revolution. He escaped to theWest, where he denounced the “beast-Tsar and his jackal-ministers” anddeclared himself a convert to radical revolutionism. He also made contactwith several Russian radicals in Switzerland, but his erratic behavior—first he declared himself a Social Democrat and within days he joinedforces with the Socialist Revolutionaries—quickly persuaded them thathe could not be relied on as an ally. The truth is that Gapon regardedhimself as a dynamic leader who had already shaped the course of eventsin Russia and would, somehow, continue to do so on his own.

In the fall of 1905, Gapon returned to St. Petersburg and performed yetanother volte-face; he abandoned his extremist views and established con-tact with the government. Witte, now prime minister, was pleased withthis turn of events but, fearing the priest’s influence, saw to it that Gaponwas given five hundred rubles on the promise that he would leave Russiaimmediately. Gapon did just that and once again aroused the enmity of theradicals for speaking favorably of Witte as the only man who could saveRussia from the abyss. Within weeks, Gapon was back in St. Petersburgdetermined to resurrect the assembly. When the police blocked that plan,he conceived of a series of intricate maneuvers to secure permission from

the police to reestablish his workers’ organization. He approached PetrRutenberg, the man who had marched next to him on Bloody Sundayand who was now a Socialist Revolutionary of some prominence, with abizarre plan. Rutenberg was to claim to have information about a con-spiracy on the part of some of his comrades to murder the minister of in-ternal affairs. In return for informing on the plotters, Rutenberg wouldreceive one hundred thousand rubles from the police, who would be ableto boast of having foiled a dangerous conspiracy. But the conspiratorswould be forewarned so that they could escape apprehension. AndGapon, having done a good turn for the police, would be allowed to re-sume his organizational activities among the Petersburg workers. No onewould be hurt and every participant in the scheme would benefit.

Rutenberg discussed Gapon’s scheme with his SR colleagues. E. F. Azef,then head of the party’s “Combat Organization” and later exposed as apolice agent, insisted that Gapon must be killed. Azef’s motive is still un-clear: he may have been carrying out orders from police officials eager toget the priest out of the way; he may have wanted to accommodate theSocialist Revolutionaries, who considered Gapon a dangerous traitor; orhe may simply have wanted to get rid of Gapon because he feared thatthe priest knew he was working for the police. In any case, on March 28,1906, Rutenberg and several other SRs lured Gapon to a cottage in asmall town near the Finnish border and brutally murdered him.

Even though Gapon’s reputation had by this time been irreparably tar-nished, his role as a catalyst of the revolutionary process cannot be over-stated. This is not the role he had envisioned for himself in 1904, but theviolence of Bloody Sunday unleashed a train of events that fundamentallychanged not only the workers’ movement in the capital but also thecourse of the entire revolution. It greatly weakened the people’s trust inthe autocrat, it turned the working class into a dynamic political force,and it made possible a loose sort of alliance between the liberals andworking class, all ominous developments for the old order. Finally,Bloody Sunday marked the transformation of what had been primarily apolitical struggle between the proponents of change and the authoritiesinto a conflict that remained political but was accompanied by lawless-ness and mass violence on a scale unknown since the Time of Troublesearly in the seventeenth century.

the government flounders

By temperament and ability, the men who occupied the leading positionsin the empire were ill-equipped to cope with the turbulence. The ruler, the



linchpin of the regime, showed no understanding at all of the unrest thathad been set off by Bloody Sunday. In his diary he limited himself to briefand superficial comments on the events that day and made his usual in-nocuous remarks about his family and the weather. In his conversationswith various officials and visitors, Nicholas insisted that since only asmall area of the country had been affected by the disorder, there was noreason to be overly concerned. His leading minister, Mirsky, was thor-oughly demoralized. Conservatives held him responsible for having“opened the doors to violent agitation” by introducing internal reformwithout taking adequate measures to keep the protest movement undercontrol. No longer confident that his policies would pacify the country,Mirsky asked to be relieved of his office. Nicholas readily accepted hisresignation on January 18 without any word of gratitude or reward. Thetsar replaced him with A. G. Bulygin, an easygoing, decent, honorableman endowed with common sense but lacking either the knowledge orcapacity for statesmanship. He favored the retention of the autocraticregime, not out of deep conviction, but rather because he had neverbothered to examine other forms of government. His main defect as aleader was that he disliked tense situations and always sought to avoidpersonal confrontations. Most liberals considered him an “absolutenonentity,” and it soon became evident that he would not be able to carryout the tsar’s charge to formulate new reform proposals.

In fact, the dominant figure in the government was a newcomer in thetop echelons of authority, General D. F. Trepov, a man held in the highestregard by Nicholas’s advisors at court. Not surprisingly, the fifty-year-oldTrepov also impressed the tsar as the ideal public servant. A dashing gen-eral “with terrifying eyes,” Trepov had served with the cavalry guardsand gave the appearance of a resolute and energetic man. In private con-versations with Nicholas, he had criticized the liberal views of Mirsky,and as chief of the Moscow police since 1896 he had demonstrated anability to handle revolutionaries. On January 11, 1905, he was appointedgovernor-general of St. Petersburg and on May 21 he assumed the addi-tional post of assistant minister of internal affairs. In effect, Trepov nowtook charge of police affairs throughout the empire, and it seemed tomany knowledgeable people that there were really two ministers of in-ternal affairs: Bulygin, who exercised little authority, and Trepov, who of-ten made policy without even consulting Bulygin. This arrangement, if itcan be called that, was a sign of the disarray that characterized the gov-ernment throughout much of 1905.

Although Trepov came to symbolize the arbitrariness and rigidity of theold order, it is not accurate to depict him simply as a bureaucrat whoseonly remedy for disorder was brute force. He was a more complicated and

thoughtful man than his many detractors realized. As police chief ofMoscow, he had concluded that police measures alone would not sufficeto stifle agitation against the autocracy. He contended that workers hadlegitimate demands for better conditions, and he also argued that studentunrest would not end until the government’s restrictions were loosened.Then in July 1905 he urged the tsar to allow Jews to participate in theelections to the planned national assembly on the grounds that only if thecauses of their discontent were removed would the Jews cease to be ac-tive in the opposition.

Trepov was not the only senior official to advocate concessions in thewake of Bloody Sunday. On January 17, 1905, A. S. Ermolov, the minis-ter of agriculture and state property, solemnly warned the tsar that theprotest movement would grow more intense. There would be a rash ofassassinations of officials, the tsar would no longer be safe, and disorderwould break out in the countryside. Moreover, Ermolov predicted thatthe monarch would soon not be able to count on soldiers to continueobeying orders to shoot people who simply wanted their grievances to beheard. Two weeks after delivering this message to the tsar, Ermolov con-tended that there existed “general disorganization in all spheres of oursocial life” and advised Nicholas to enlist the support of the “healthy el-ements” of the people by establishing a legislative body of elected repre-sentatives that would participate in the formulation of government poli-cies. Ermolov, it should be stressed, was speaking as a person committedto the preservation of the monarchy. V. N. Kokovtsov, the minister of fi-nance, was not as outspoken or liberal as his colleague, but he, too, fa-vored concessions. He wanted the government to urge industrialists tofind ways of satisfying workers’ demands without undermining the eco-nomic well-being of their enterprises.

Even if the government had decided to adopt all these reform meas-ures, it still had to decide how to deal with an immediate problem, risingunrest. The truth is that despite its long-standing concern with threats todomestic tranquillity posed by radical agitators, the Ministry of InternalAffairs had not drawn up any directives on riot control by local officials.Responsibility for police activities in the empire rested with governors orgovernors-general, who were required to report to the ministry in St. Pe-tersburg. However, officials in the capital never established clear lines ofresponsibility within the department or clear channels for reporting onlocal developments, with the result that provincial bureaucrats devisedtheir own strategies to contain the disorder in their jurisdictions, which isprecisely what happened when unrest spread across the country in 1905.The differences in those strategies underline the degree to which bureau-cratic centralization in late-imperial Russia was deeply flawed.



The government had at its disposal one weapon against disorder that,theoretically at least, made possible a degree of uniformity in its ap-proach: it could proclaim emergency regulations in any region of the em-pire. This power originated in a statute of August 14, 1881, which pro-vided for two kinds of special measures, Reinforced Security (UsilennaiaOkhrana) and Extraordinary Security (Chrezvychainaia Okhrana). Thefirst could be imposed by the minister of internal affairs or a governor-general acting with the minister’s approval. The second could be imposedonly with the approval of the tsar. Designed to facilitate the eradicationof sedition, the statute was vague about what conditions would justifyplacing a region in a state of emergency. In each case of unrest, the ulti-mate decision lay in the hands of the authorities in St. Petersburg. In ad-dition to these emergency powers, the government could declare an areaunder martial law, which meant military rule pure and simple.

The arbitrary power invested in local officials (governors-general, gov-ernors, and city governors) under the exceptional measures of 1881 wasenormous. Under Reinforced Security, officials could keep citizens inprison for up to three months, impose fines, prohibit public gatherings,exile alleged offenders, transfer blocks of judicial cases from criminal tomilitary courts, and dismiss local government and zemstvo employees.Under Extraordinary Security, a region was under the authority of a com-mander in chief, who was empowered to dismiss elected zemstvo deputiesand even to dissolve zemstvos completely, to suspend periodicals, and toclose universities and other centers of advanced study for up to onemonth. Implementation of the exceptional measures largely depended onthe whims of local officials: in some provinces they acted with restraint,whereas in others they used their powers to the utmost. Frequently, offi-cials operating under the emergency rules arbitrarily exiled beggars, va-grants, and “generally disorderly persons.”

The indiscriminate application of the statute of 1881—appropriatelyreferred to by one historian as the “real constitution” of the empire—demonstrated more than anything else the absence of a legal order inRussia. But the statute was of dubious effectiveness in maintaining order,as some government officials acknowledged. The people’s resentment ofthe emergency regulations often intensified their defiance of authority,which, in turn, provoked officials to apply even harsher measures. Earlyin 1905, a prestigious commission under the chairmanship of Count A.P. Ignatiev noted that the use of emergency measures raised serious legaland practical questions but he made no far-reaching recommendations ontheir future application. It is doubtful whether the government wouldhave allowed the statute of 1881 to lapse for the simple reason that itcommanded no other weapon in the struggle against unrest. The security

police was quite inept and ill-informed about the activities and where-abouts of radical opponents to the regime, who were increasingly resort-ing to terror. In February 1905, they shocked the government and muchof society by assassinating Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, the uncleand brother-in-law of the tsar. True, the authorities depended on nonbu-reaucratic groups such as the nobility to assume some of the burdens ofadministering local regions, but such an arrangement could not be veryefficient, especially in times of crisis. The only recourse appeared to be theemergency regulations, which were applied on a vast scale after BloodySunday. By March 1906, thirty of the empire’s seventy-eight provinceswere entirely ruled by officials exercising special powers; in another thirtyprovinces sizable regions were administered under emergency rules.

For weeks after Bloody Sunday, Nicholas received conflicting advice—more repression or more concessions—from his ministers and advisers onhow to deal with the unrest. He himself could not make up his mind andin frustration turned to Bulygin, who urged concessions. “One wouldthink,” the tsar said, “that you are afraid a revolution will break out.”To this the minister of internal affairs replied, “Your Majesty , the revo-lution has already begun.” Nicholas now opted for a conciliatory course,but once again he followed a procedure that had become a pattern withhim: he coupled the promise of reform with a savage attack on the insti-gators of unrest and a restatement of his commitment to the old order—all in one day.

On the morning of February 18, the monarch published an imperialmanifesto denouncing the “ill-intentioned leaders” of disorder whowished to “create a new government for the country based on principlesalien to our fatherland.” He called on all Russians to “stand firm aroundthe Throne, true to the traditions of Our past . . . and support the autoc-racy for the good of all Our faithful subjects.” But in the evening,Nicholas issued a ukase to the Senate that directed the Committee ofMinisters to present him with suggestions, based on ideas proposed by“private persons and institutions,” on how to improve the governmentand the “people’s existence.” Both pronouncements emanated fromTsarskoe Selo, the ruler’s favorite residence, without the prior notificationto any minister, which in itself was highly unusual. Then, to compoundthe confusion, the tsar sent a rescript to Bulygin, also on the evening ofFebruary 18, informing him of his intention to permit individuals—the“worthiest people”—elected by the population of Russia to participate inthe discussion and preliminary formulation of legislative proposals. Theminister of internal affairs was to head a commission to draw up plansfor the implementation of this rather vague promise to establish somekind of legislative assembly.



The ministers and many political activists were “dumbfounded” todiscover that within one day the tsar had made such inconsistent pro-nouncements. “Is it any wonder,” asked I. I. Petrunkevich, a leading lib-eral, “that the authority of a government that does not know in themorning what it will undertake in the evening declined in the eyes of thepeople to the point of complete rejection.”

For about four months—roughly from late February until July—or-ganizations of various kinds, but most notably zemstvos, city councils,and cultural and professional societies, engaged in a “petition campaign”in response to the tsar’s request for ideas on how to improve the state.Hundreds of meetings were held throughout the empire to discuss reformproposals and to adopt resolutions that were dispatched to the ministerof internal affairs. The newspapers carried accounts of the meetings andthus publicized the grievances and demands that were being voiced bygrowing numbers of people. Instead of curbing unrest, the monarch’sukase proved to be a catalyst that mobilized masses of people who hadnot previously dared to express opinions on political issues. By the springof 1905 the government was struck by an avalanche of petitions from vir-tually every corner of the empire. It was a spontaneous outpouring ofpopular sentiment, which represented the only more or less coherentmovement for change. Dominated by liberals and liberal demands, thepetition campaign really amounted to a revival, in more intense form, ofthe liberal offensive of the fall and winter of 1904–5.

It was clear that public opinion had shifted to the left since late 1904.Groups that a few months earlier had been quite conservative now joinedin the demands for freedom and for the rule of law. In the borderlands,city councils called not only for political reform but also for an end to na-tional and religious discrimination and for social and economic reforms.A growing number of groups among the intelligentsia demanded the in-troduction of a genuinely democratic suffrage. Often, the resolutions ofthe opposition contained demands for an immediate end to the war withJapan and for the convocation of a constituent assembly, which woulddevise an entirely new structure of government. Some of them also calledfor the lowering of the working day to eight hours, the introductions of aprogressive income tax and workers’ insurance, and the nationalizationof the land.

In mid-May the zemstvo movement took the bold step of seeking anaudience with the tsar to urge him to change his policies. It chose as theleader of the delegation a moderate liberal who had initially supportedthe war, Prince S. N. Trubetskoi. A man of rare charm, universally ad-mired for his sincerity and decency, Trubetskoi was an excellent choice todeliver a plea for reform, and after some hesitation the monarch agreed

to meet the liberals on June 6. Trubetskoi began his powerful address byexpressing his gratitude for the audience and by assuring Nicholas that“Love of the motherland and the consciousness of our debt to You haveled us here.” He then pleaded with the monarch not to allow his advisersand officials to pervert his announced policy to change course and to“call together elected representatives of the people.” Trubetskoi deliber-ately avoided specific recommendations on the nature of the future legis-lature except to express the hope that it would not be a body chosen onlyby some classes of the population. “As the Russian Tsar is not the Tsar ofthe nobility,” Trubetskoi said, “not the Tsar of the peasants or of themerchants, not the Tsar of classes, but the Tsar of all Rus, so also theelected people from the whole population, called to work with You onthe affairs of state, should serve general and not estate interests.” Theprince also urged Nicholas to permit free discussion of all issues affectingthe well-being of the state and concluded with the following words:“Sire! The renewal of Russia should be based on trust.”

The tsar seemed to be moved by the courteous, patriotic, and moder-ate address. He was clearly relieved not to have been exposed to apolemic. He even nodded a few times in apparent agreement with Tru-betskoi’s points, especially when he spoke of a legislature representing allthe people. One of the delegates was so moved that he wept openly, andtwo others were on the verge of tears.

In his official response to Trubetskoi’s address, Nicholas restated hisintention of proceeding with major reforms. “Cast away your doubts,”he declared. “My will—the Tsar’s will—to call together representativesfrom the people is unswerving. Attracting them to the work of the statewill be done in orderly fashion. I concern myself with this matter everyday. . . . I hope that you will help me in this work.”

Although left-wing liberals criticized Trubetskoi for his lack of mili-tancy and expressed doubts about the tsar’s will to carry out his prom-ises, a large portion of the opposition viewed the audience of June 6 ashighly significant. Simply by listening to the plea for reform the tsar, itwas widely believed, had in effect legalized a sizable portion of the oppo-sition. Even liberals skeptical of the ruler’s motives came to realize thatthe meeting was bound to benefit their cause. If the tsar kept his word,the encounter would mark a major step toward some sort of constitu-tional order. If he reneged, moderates would be driven to the left.

It took only two weeks for the tsar and his advisers to confirm theworst suspicions of the skeptical liberals. On June 20 and 21, Nicholasmade a point of greeting with singular warmth two groups of conserva-tives whom he considered to be a counterpoise to the liberal activists. Heinformed the first group that he favored a representative body that would



have consultative authority only and that would be elected only by thenobility and the peasantry. He listened with apparent approval to the sec-ond group, which advocated the retention of the autocracy. It was clearthat the court was mobilizing public opinion against the constitutional-ists, making a mockery of the tsar’s conciliatory words on June 6.

The meeting on June 6 marked the last occasion on which leaders of asignificant sector of the opposition sought reform by appealing to thetsar. There is every reason to believe that if the delegates led by Trubet-skoi had been met halfway by the government, they would have donetheir best to calm the political storm. But the tsar’s intransigence and du-plicity persuaded them that their goals could be realized only be aligningthemselves with the more militant elements in the country, elements thatwere resorting increasingly to direct actions of various kinds to wrestconcessions from the authorities. According to the left-liberal Petrunke-vich, he and many of his associates now concluded that a revolution wasnecessary. The nonsocialist opposition was seized by a new mood of po-litical distemper, which lasted from late June until the fall of 1905.

This shift came only weeks after the government’s attempts to pacifythe workers had backfired. It will be recalled that shortly after BloodySunday the government had created the Shidlovsky Commission, to becomposed of representatives selected by the authorities, industry, andworkers themselves for the purpose of examining workers’ grievances inthe capital and developing proposals to improve working conditions. Theelections of the workers’ representatives were to be indirect, leaving thefinal selections to chosen electors. But before the final selections weremade, the 417 electors, many of whom either belonged to Social Democ-ratic organizations or sympathized with their aims, decided to formulatea series of seven demands. Senator N. V. Shidlovsky had no difficultywith the first three demands, which called for full participation of theworker’s representatives in all deliberations of the commission. But he re-jected the last four, which called for publication of the protocols, the re-opening of eleven branches of Gapon’s assembly, release from prison ofworkers arrested since January 1, and a guarantee of immunity for work-ers who openly discussed their “needs.” The workers’ electors threateneda general strike if their demands were not met. On February 20, the tsar,acting on Shidlovsky’s advice, disbanded the commission. When betweenfifty and sixty thousand workers protested by going out on strike, thegovernment launched a new wave of arrests. But for the workers of thecapital the events surrounding the commission had two positive conse-quences: (1) they amounted to an acknowledgment that industrial unrestin Russia was a serious problem, not simply the concoction of outsidetroublemakers; and (2) they laid the groundwork for the labor unions

that were formed later in 1905 as well as for the soviet that played soprominent a role in St. Petersburg during the last months of the year.

On the very day the tsar disbanded the Shidlovsky Commission, he au-thorized the formation of another commission to examine the workers’question under the chairmanship of the minister of finance, V. N.Kokovtsov. This commission consisted solely of bureaucrats, though thechairman was empowered to call on experts for information. Kokovtsovwas a conservative but he now believed that reform was necessary andhis group made some surprisingly progressive proposals: legalization ofworkers’ organizations, the creation of a special fund for medical assis-tance for workers, shortening of the workday, and the establishment of astate insurance system for workers. Industrialists who were invited to theplenary sessions of the commission were aghast, insisting that industrialunrest stemmed not from workers’ dissatisfaction with their economicplight but from their dissatisfaction with the political system. The indus-trialists also claimed that the proposals of the commission could not pos-sibly be enacted without seriously harming the national economy. Thenthey withdrew from the commission, which continued to meet periodi-cally without accomplishing anything of importance. Various other com-missions formed to deal with workers and peasants’ demands also failedto produce reforms.

All in all, in the first weeks following Bloody Sunday the governmentmade few significant concessions to the opposition beyond the vaguepromise to establish a national legislature. In February it began to easerestrictions of religious freedom, and over the course of several weekssome 1,600 people who had been punished for religious dissent were ei-ther granted pardons or allowed to return from exile. On April 15, theauthorities bowed to reality by revoking two official circulars of 1897 onthe punishment of strikers. Industrial strikes in 1905 were so numerousand involved so many people that it was no longer possible to arrest in-stigators of work stoppages or to exile strikers to their native villages.Also, the government finally grasped the foolishness of sending strikersback to the countryside, where they could stir up unrest among the peas-antry. None of these measures succeeded in dampening unrest. Hostilitytoward the autocratic regime continued to deepen and intensify.


chapter 2

The Assault on Authority

civil disorder and labor unrest

Did the events of 1904–7 amount to a revolution? Certainly, an orthodoxMarxist might dispute the designation, for political power was not trans-ferred from one social class to another. Non-Marxists, who define a rev-olution as a fundamental change in the system of legality, might also hes-itate to use the term, since the tsar’s authority remained paramount eventhough it was clearly reduced. Yet it is understandable that the termshould have been adopted by contemporaries and retained by politicalactivists as well as historians. From mid-1904 until late in 1905, there oc-curred an assault on authority from below so massive, potent, and suc-cessful that by all appearances the old regime was disintegrating. Civil or-der broke down, and for several months the government seemedincapable of little more than biding its time until the outbursts of defi-ance, generally unplanned and unorganized, had spent themselves. So ef-fective a challenge to the state’s monopoly of power, even though tempo-rary, may justifiably be characterized as a revolution.

A few examples of how authority was flouted with impunity will suf-fice to demonstrate the changed atmosphere in Russia. Officially, censor-ship still prevailed in 1905 (in modified form), and the press was certainlymindful of it, but beginning in mid-1904 newspapers daringly criticizedthe old order. After Bloody Sunday the press widely adopted a practicethat came to be known as iavochnym poriadkom—“without prior per-mission.” It would print what it believed the public should know, and thegovernment, in effect acknowledging its impotence, largely ignored theinfractions of regulations. Readers of the press were now informed invivid detail of disorder in the cities and countryside, of the clamor for ba-sic reform, of the military disasters Russia suffered at the hands of Japan,

and of discussions by opponents of the autocracy on how to change thecountry’s institutions. On several occasions, highly confidential delibera-tions of senior bureaucrats or official committees were leaked to newspa-pers, which readily ran articles about them. The liberal Russkie vedo-mosti frequently denounced the incompetence and arbitrariness of the“disgraceful . . . bureaucratic system” and asserted that nothing short ofa constitutional order with civil liberties guaranteed to all subjects wouldrestore order and stability. In May 1905 the paper echoed the by-now-popular cry of liberals: “We can no longer live like this.”

There were other signs of governmental weakness. The authoritiesfailed to maintain order during the rash of attacks on innocent civiliansby hooligans and right-wing extremists known as Black Hundreds thatbroke out shortly after Bloody Sunday in many cities and towns.

The purpose of the attacks was to intimidate anyone inclined to partic-ipate in antigovernment strikes or demonstrations. In Nizhnii-Novgorod,for example, mobs regularly and with impunity assaulted well-dressedpeople or anyone who appeared to be educated. On a single day in July,between seventy and eighty people were injured. In Moscow and Pskov,hooligans accused children, some of them only nine or ten years old, of“sedition” and then beat them in full view of the police, who did nothingat all. Also in Moscow merchants were subjected to so many wanton at-tacks that they provided for their own defense. In Mogilev, policementhemselves engaged in lawlessness. They arbitrarily arrested fifty peopleon charges of antigovernment activities. No evidence was uncovered tosustain the charges and all were released, but only after many of themhad been physically abused.

Pogroms against Jews were an especially virulent form of disorder.Though sporadic and scattered over a wide area of the empire, theywreaked havoc on numerous local communities. During the last fourmonths of 1904, there were thirty-three anti-Jewish riots, many of themstaged by soldiers in response to allegations in newspapers that Jews werehelping the enemies of the fatherland. Then in the spring and summer of1905 the Black Hundreds went on the offensive against Jews, believingthem to be the main instigators of the opposition to Tsar Nicholas. Thereis little evidence to support charges that the government in St. Petersburginspired the attacks, but very often the police and soldiers looked theother way for several days; occasionally they joined the marauders.

The breakdown of public order was so widespread that in the springand summer of 1905 one local organ of authority after another called formajor reform of the police powers of the central government. A few ofthe authorities went so far as to refuse allocating funds to reinforce theexisting police force, others asked provincial governors not to dispatch

40 Assault on Authority

Assault on Authority 41

Cossacks to areas of unrest because they only made matters worse byprovoking “irritation and resentment,” and still others took up the ques-tion of organizing local militias. In some localities, government officialsactually gave their blessing to private citizens who showed interest informing their own paramilitary units to maintain order.

By the summer of 1905, the police also became increasingly ineffectivein coping with common criminality. Foreign observers noted that “mur-der, pillage, massacres and riots are rife in different parts of the country,”and that citizens had come to view criminality “as being quite in the or-dinary course of events.” To protect themselves, citizens in St. Petersburg,Moscow, and in other cities resorted to mob law, which the police oftenignored. In some cities, criminals, fearful of roving bands, saw to theirown protection by forming “fighting organizations” that struck back atthe vigilantes. In Kishinev the situation deteriorated to such an extentthat the governor of Bessarabia Province feared that the city was beingconverted into “an arena of civil war,” for which he held the police re-sponsible because they had taken no action against criminal elements. Toone observer, it seemed as though the entire country was “on the highroad to complete anarchy and social chaos.”

Of course, the Russian police had never been known for efficiency orscrupulousness, but in 1905 their performance reached a new low. Morethan likely, they were demoralized by the rash of terrorist attacks on po-licemen, which could not be contained. All over the country, “the assas-sination of police officials,” according to a British diplomatic report ofApril 12, “continues on a large scale,” with hardly a day passing “with-out at least . . . [one] victim being recorded.”

Another, no less dramatic, sign of governmental weakness was its in-ability to enforce the law against strikes, which increased at a rapid rateafter Bloody Sunday. In the spring of 1905, some of the more moderateofficials, among them the minister of finance Kokovtsov, came to termswith the realities of the new situation and proposed legalizing tradeunions and the right to strike, only to be overruled by other, stronger el-ements at the highest levels of government. This intransigence further em-bittered workers, who increasingly supported various protest movements.

The labor unrest that swept across the empire was unprecedented notonly in its magnitude but also in its thrust. None of the previous strikeshad touched as explicitly, directly, and frequently on political issues,though a few words of clarification are in order on the classification ofstrikes. Factory inspectors, who were government employees, tended tomake a rigid distinction, often stressed by historians, between workers’economic and political demands. But in fact it was not always possible todraw a clear line of demarcation between the two kinds of demands. To

be sure, in many instances workers who went on strike emphasized eco-nomic grievances, but in autocratic Russia, where collective actionagainst an employer was illegal, a work stoppage was inevitably a chal-lenge to the authorities and therefore a threat to the political status quo.Moreover, early in 1905 many workers on strike called for the legaliza-tion of workers’ committees, and this came close to being an explicit po-litical demand. In effect, the strikers were asking for the right of free as-sociation, which, if granted, would have amounted to a significantliberalization of the political order. The point is that although strikingworkers may have stressed economic issues, they were engaged in an ac-tivity with serious political implications. The authorities were never indoubt about this, a point that should be kept in mind whenever theworkers’ concern with economic issues is considered.

Nevertheless, it is useful to draw attention to a change in emphasis inthe workers’ articulation of demands during the first half of 1905. Forseveral months early in that year, workers on strike concentrated on eco-nomic questions. Only rarely did they touch explicitly on larger politicalissues, such as the abolition of the autocracy, alterations in the economicsystem, or ending the war with Japan. When they began to do so withsome frequency late in the spring and during the summer of that year, itwas clear that industrial workers had been radicalized.

During the early months of 1905, strikes also tended to erupt sponta-neously and lacked firm leadership. By the end of the year, however, theyoften assumed the character of reasonably disciplined affairs; in someworkers’ organizations, political activists, generally Social Democrats butalso Socialist Revolutionaries, attained positions of prominence. More-over, professionals and white-collar workers began to form unions, a de-velopment of the utmost importance during the national crisis in Octo-ber. Equally important, until mid-November 1905 the strike movementcommanded the support of many liberals, not because they approved ofall the workers’ economic demands, but rather because they viewed theindustrial disorder as an effective means of prodding the regime intogranting political concessions.

The vast amount of statistical information on labor unrest in 1905must be treated with caution. Not only was the collection of data incom-plete, but also the strike movement was extremely complicated, makingit difficult to decide what criteria to apply in assessing its magnitude.Should workers who laid down their tools three times in 1905 be countedas one or three strikers? Should workers who deliberately performed be-low capacity or who stopped working one or two hours before the endof their shift be regarded as strikers? Should an enterprise at which 25percent of the labor force staged a job action be considered in effect



closed down, especially in those instances where a large percentage of thestrikers were skilled workers? These are only some of the more frequentproblems encountered in any attempt to quantify the strike movement.Still, labor unrest was so critical a development in 1905 that a few statis-tics are worth mentioning.

Strikes occurred most often in the first and last quarters of the year.During the three months from January to March, more than twenty timesas many workers participated in work stoppages in Russia as went onstrike in any one year from 1895 to 1908 in Germany, the United States,and France. According to officials who monitored only 70 percent of theindustrial labor force, in January 1905 some 414,000 workers were onstrike and in February, 291,000. In March and April the number declinedto 72,000 and 80,000 respectively, but in May it rose to 220,000, in partbecause of the celebrations on May 1. In June and July the number ofstrikers decreased to 142,000 and 150,000, respectively. In the summermonths of August and September, the strike movement declined again:78,000 and 36,000. In October it rose to its peak, 481,000, and it re-mained high in November (323,000) and December (418,000). Alto-gether in 1905, 13,110 establishments were affected by work stoppages.More than 2.5 million working days were lost. The cost of labor unrestto employers has been estimated at 127 million rubles and to workers atmore than 17.5 million rubles.

Initially, in January 1905 workers in St. Petersburg as well as in otherregions of the empire drew up lists of demands only after going out onstrike, further indication that the strikes were spontaneous. Once formu-lated, the demands focused on the following issues: increased pay, theeight-hour workday, improved medical care, and better cultural facilitiessuch as libraries and schools. But workers also made what might be char-acterized as social demands: they insisted on polite treatment by foremen,who habitually demeaned workers by addressing them with the informal“thou,” fining them for infractions of factory rules, and searching themto prevent theft of company goods. Finally, workers demanded the rightto elect committees of their peers to represent them.

Because the weeks after Bloody Sunday were marked by political in-stability, workers scored some notable successes: in 70 percent of the so-called economic strikes, they won partial or complete victories. Althoughsome of the concessions were rather minor, such as a reduction of theworking week of textile workers from sixty-three to sixty hours, thestandard of living for a large number of industrial workers seems to haveimproved noticeably in many regions of the country.

Officials who believed that the strike movement would dissipatequickly from sheer fatigue discovered that they were deluding themselves.

On the contrary, there was every indication that labor unrest would in-tensify because workers were succeeding in creating a variety of organi-zations capable of pressing workers’ demands in a more disciplined way.The deputies elected by numerous factories in St. Petersburg in responseto directives from the Shidlovsky Commission continued to function aslocal committees representing their constituencies. More significantly, inthe spring of 1905 workers began to establish trade unions in defiance ofthe law. All in all, by the end of September sixteen unions were formed inthe capital, twenty-four in Moscow, and a few others in scattered partsof the empire. During the last three months of the year, fifty-seven unionsappeared in the capital and sixty-seven in Moscow. Industrialists werealarmed at this development, but the movement toward unionization wastoo powerful, and the government too weak, for it to be stopped.

The intelligentsia also formed “unions,” though strictly speaking thatwas a misnomer. Although composed of individuals with similar profes-sional interests, the unions of the intelligentsia directed most of their ef-forts not at obtaining improved economic conditions but at abolishing theautocracy. Lawyers in St. Petersburg took the lead when they met, in de-fiance of police directives, on January 30, 1905, and by late April no lessthen fourteen national professional unions had been established repre-senting physicians, journalists, engineers, pharmacists, academicians, ac-countants, agronomists, veterinarians, teachers, railway employees, andzemstvo activists as well as people advocating equality for women andJews. The membership of these unions ranged from 1,500 to 7,500. OnMay 8–9, sixty delegates from the fourteen unions attended a congress inMoscow and founded an umbrella association, the Union of Unions,which served as a “connecting link” between liberals and revolutionaries.Its overall strategy amounted to a fusion of “liberal tactics with the threatof revolution.” Actually, by the summer of 1905 P. N. Miliukov, a lead-ing liberal and the chairman of the Union of Unions, seems to haveadopted the cause of revolution. At the union’s second congress in Junehe wrote the resolution (adopted by the delegates) that called for themost radical measures to topple the regime: “All means are now legiti-mate against the frightful menace that is posed by the very fact of thecontinuing existence of the present government, and all means should beemployed.” Two months later, the union’s Central Committee voiced itssupport for a general strike directed specifically at the achievement of po-litical goals. Moderate liberals recoiled at this lunge to the left, and by thelate summer Miliukov, fearful of a split within liberalism, began to dis-tance himself from the union. In fact, his change of tactics merely delayedthe split.

In 1905 one other mass organization worthy of discussion made itsappearance: the soviet (council). Its importance in Russian and Soviet his-



tory is of course beyond dispute, but its impact on the turbulent events of1905 has generated considerable controversy among historians, whohave not been able to agree on whether it was originally devoted to a rev-olutionary conquest of power or to gaining economic concessions forworkers. In fact, the distinguishing feature of the earliest soviets is thatthey represented not only people from one factory or trade but a widerange of workers in a variety of plants in one geographical region, gener-ally in an entire city. Their purpose was to provide unified leadership forworkers and to serve as strike committees; gradually many of themevolved into organizations that fused the struggle for economic and po-litical change. The emergence of soviets was a complex and confusingprocess, and no account that emphasizes only one of their functions doesjustice to them.

An organization widely considered to have been the first soviet (eventhough it did not adopt that name) appeared in mid-May in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, a city of eighty thousand inhabitants in the central Russianindustrial region. Known as the “Russian Manchester,” Invanovo-Vozne-sensk was a center of the textile industry, one in which conditions ofwork were especially harsh—a fourteen-hour workday was common. Inan attempt to secure better conditions, workers at one factory went onstrike on May 12; within a few days some thirty-two thousand otherworkers joined the strike and every factory was closed. When the work-ers submitted a list of twenty-four demands to the district factory inspec-tor, the inspector suggested that deputies from individual plants beelected to conduct negotiations for them all. The workers agreed after theauthorities promised not to arrest the deputies. On May 15, the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Assembly of Delegates (composed of 151 deputies) was born,and it quickly elected a presidium to act as an executive. Thus, the first“soviet,” an institution that came to be revered and romanticized byRussian revolutionaries, owed its origins, at least in some measure, to asuggestion by a tsarist official.

For the first three weeks of the strike there was no violence in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, in large measure because the assembly quickly succeeded inestablishing its authority over the city’s labor force and because it tookmeasures to avoid disturbances. Most notably, it created a militia chargedwith forestalling clashes between strikers and Black Hundreds as well asbetween strikers and strikebreakers and with keeping workers in remotefactories informed of the assembly’s decisions. Late in May, however, re-lations between the strikers and the authorities began to deteriorate,mainly because the governor prohibited a mass meeting called to protestthe use of strikebreakers. The workers held their meeting anyway andwere attacked by Cossacks; several workers were killed and many werearrested. Infuriated, workers went on a rampage, throwing stones at

buildings and policemen, tearing down telegraph poles and wires, andlooting factories and liquor stores. The acting governor received author-ization to place the city under “Reinforced Security” and ordered Cos-sacks to conduct extensive searches. After forty-seven days, a group ofworkers gave up and returned to their jobs with a vow to resume thestruggle as soon as they regained their strength. Most continued thestrike, but after the employers made very some modest concessions they,too, began to drift back to the factories and by July 18 the strike ended.The assembly, acknowledging defeat, disbanded.

Nevertheless, the labor unrest in Ivanovo-Voznesensk was hailed bymany workers and people on the left as an historic event. Outside theKingdom of Poland, it was the longest and most disciplined strike be-tween January and October 1905. Moreover, the assembly in Ivanovo-Voznesensk as well as in Kostroma, where an assembly was also formed,marked a new development in workers’ organizations. It was not thebrainchild of any theorist; no one planned the formation of the assemblyand no one had defined its functions and goals. The assembly made itsappearance because workers as well as tsarist officials were looking for apractical way of dealing with a work stoppage of major proportions.Originally interested primarily in economic concessions for workers, theassembly in Ivanovo-Voznesensk within short order assumed certain po-lice powers, which was even more threatening to the authorities than thedemands for freedom of speech and assembly. The evolution of this first“soviet” demonstrates anew the difficulty of attempting to draw a firmdistinction between workers’ economic and political demands. In theRussia of 1905, protest movements could rarely avoid politics, even ifthey were disposed to do so.

By engaging in strikes and by creating labor organizations—generallywithout the participation of political activists—workers acquired a senseof their own power, of which they had been only remotely conscious be-fore 1905. For this reason, the labor unrest from January to August 1905must be considered one of the more critical developments of the revolu-tion. Without it, the most massive attack on the autocracy in Octoberwould hardly have been possible.

minorities, peasants, soldiers, and sailors

The assault on authority spread to several borderlands of the empire,where it was characterized by two features: it was notably violent fromits inception, and it acquired an explicitly political thrust earlier than the



mass protest movements in the ethnically Russian regions of the country.Deep national resentments intermingled with economic and social factorsto produce particularly explosive conditions. Ever since the reign ofAlexander III (1881–94), the government had sought to exploit GreatRussian national sentiments to quash the growing unrest. Ruthless poli-cies of Russification and persecution of minorities, it was hoped, wouldprompt the masses of Great Russians to rally around the autocracy. Butas soon as the central government was perceived to be under siege in thedays following Bloody Sunday, it turned out that the government’s poli-cies on the national question had failed. National sentiment was stillstrong among the minorities and clearly played a role in the unfoldingevents, though it is not easy to separate the national from the social andpolitical factors in assessing their relative importance in stimulating un-rest of 1905. But there is no doubt that in several outlying regions of theempire there was disorder marked by special ferocity, most notably in thePolish kingdom, the Caucasus, and the Baltic provinces (Estland, Livland,and Kurland).

The people of the Polish kingdom, under Russian control since thepartition of Poland (1772–95) and subjected to Russification after thelate 1860s, harbored profound grievances against the tsarist regime; how-ever, for a variety of complex economic, political, and cultural reasons,they failed to unite behind an anti-Russian program. Economically, thePoles enjoyed several advantages as subjects of the empire. Although the11.3 million people in the Polish kingdom constituted only 7.9 percent ofthe empire’s population, their industrial output amounted to about 25percent that of the entire country. For some time, the metallurgical andtextile industries in Poland had benefited from the protective tariff im-posed by the tsarist government as well as from the lucrative markets inRussian Asia. A growing number of Poles also held high managerial po-sitions in various sectors of the Russian economy.

But the economic benefits were offset by the heavy-handed dominationby the tsarist government. The government in St. Petersburg did not per-mit the Poles to form zemstvos or city councils and tried in numerousways to hamper the development of Polish culture. It prohibited theteaching of Polish or the Catholic religion in the schools; it mandated theuse of the Russian language in all public institutions, and it refused toemploy any person of Polish origin or of the Catholic faith in governmentpositions. On a per-capita basis, less was spent on education in Polandthan in Russia proper, and the Poles were required each year to con-tribute 150 million rubles to the imperial treasury.

Deeply patriotic, most Poles detested the Russians for seeking to crushtheir national and cultural heritage, but many also could not help being

grateful for their economic advantages. Moreover, however repressive theRussians were, the Germans were even harsher in pursuing the “Ger-manization” of the Polish territory under their control. This complicatedmatters for political leaders hostile to tsarism: if they succeeded in weak-ening the Russian government, they might facilitate the expansion ofGermany’s influence in Russia.

Opinion in Poland on the Russo-Japanese War was divided. The so-called Loyalists or conservatives, broadly representative of the gentry,supported Russia unconditionally because they feared that its defeatwould give Germany and Austria-Hungary a free hand in the Balkansand in the Polish areas that each country controlled. The left vigorouslyopposed the war, and the leader of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), JosefPilsudski, actually went to Japan to win support for his plan to stage aninsurrection for Polish independence. The Social Democratic Party of theKingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) also advocated the over-throw of the autocracy and the introduction of socialism, but did not fa-vor Poland’s separation from the empire. Finally, the National League, amiddle-class party led by Roman Dmowski, sought conciliation betweenthe Russians and the Poles, but only if the kingdom were granted culturaland political autonomy within the empire.

The war in the Far East had a devastating impact on the Polish econ-omy, and by late 1904 the mood of the country was decidedly tense. OnNovember 14, the PPS organized a mass demonstration in Warsaw thatwas accompanied by a good deal of violence. Then, within four days ofBloody Sunday, major strikes broke out in Warsaw and Lodz, and, sig-nificantly, the strikers immediately emphasized political as well as eco-nomic demands. In Lodz they called for an end to the autocracy and tothe war and asked for an eight-hour workday and a raise of no less than166 percent. Angered by the rejection of these demands, workers at-tacked soldiers with stones and on occasion with guns, and in the ensuingscuffles the Poles suffered numerous casualties. There was considerablymore violence in Warsaw, where workers staged a general strike on Jan-uary 14. Initially, peaceful demonstrations were held, but the presence oflarge numbers of troops in the city made clashes virtually inevitable. OnJanuary 16 alone, some sixty thousand cartridges are said to have beenfired at demonstrators in Warsaw. Within a three-day period, sixty-fourcivilians were killed and sixty-nine wounded (of whom twenty-nine even-tually died). On January 17, the government placed Warsaw under a stateof siege; nevertheless workers in the city periodically engaged in massivestrikes.

By February 1905, the protest movement had spread to Polish educa-tional institutions, where the major cause of discontent was Russification.



Students at Warsaw University and the Polytechnical Institute, as well aspupils at high schools and even at some elementary schools, stopped at-tending class and joined street demonstrations.

Early in April and again in May, the government relented somewhatand permitted schools at all levels to teach the Scriptures in Polish andlifted other restrictions on the use of Polish in the classroom. These con-cessions, and a few others, were too niggardly and came too late. Work-ers and numerous professional groups continued to demonstrate and topass resolutions in favor of a constituent assembly and autonomy forPoland or, at the very least, greater cultural freedom. In the meantime,disorder spread to smaller cities and towns, and from May to November1905 the country was on the verge of civil war. For the tsarist govern-ment, unrest in Poland was extremely burdensome, for it felt obliged tomaintain an army of some three hundred thousand men in the country ata time when every soldier was needed at the front in the Far East.

Even before the outbreak of the revolution, the structure of authority hadcollapsed in Guriia, a small, picturesque area in western Georgia border-ing on the Black Sea and Turkey. Early in 1903, many peasants, actingunder the influence of Social Democrats (who later turned to Menshe-vism), stopped paying taxes; the harsh countermeasures by the authori-ties proved to be futile. The peasants simply boycotted all government in-stitutions and in some villages they even tore up portraits of the tsar andpublicly burned them. It was not uncommon for the clergy to participatein the protest movement by refusing to perform burial rites for govern-ment spies murdered by enraged citizens. Within a few months, the localorgans of government literally ceased to function and authority nowrested with a newly formed Guriian Social Democratic Committee. Forall intents and purposes, Guriia may be said to have seceded from the em-pire by mid-1903. The government took no action to crush the commit-tee, apparently because the rebellion was confined to a small, sparselypopulated, and remote region.

Shortly after Bloody Sunday, however, the protest movement spread toareas bordering on Guriia and to other parts of Transcaucasia. “We wantwhat [the peasants] in Guriia have,” was a cry widely heard in Januaryand February of 1905. In numerous localities, peasants began to ignorethe directives of the authorities and engaged in violent attacks on offi-cials, nobles, and clergymen. When it became evident that the army couldnot stop the unrest a revolutionary peasant committee announced itsseizure of power in Georgia. It abrogated all taxes as well as obligationsto landlords and the clergy, and it confiscated state and private lands,

which were distributed to peasants without compensating the owners. Inaddition, the committee established a system of obligatory and free edu-cation for children, urged peasants in the villages to create organs of self-government, and demanded the convocation of a democratically electedconstituent assembly, the teaching of Georgian in every school, and theuse of the Georgian language in the conduct of official business.

In the regions of Batum, Kinstrik, Ozaugueti, Echialauri, and Tiflis, asfar as the northwest area of Kakhetia, the peasants also proceeded to or-ganize their own system of police and justice. In each village every groupof ten families delegated one man “of good reputation” to serve as po-liceman and to dispense justice. Whenever a crime was committed, theplaintiffs would appear before the “deputy,” who then formed a “sort oftribunal” with other deputies to investigate the case and pass sentence onthe transgressors.

On February 18, 1905, the government placed all of Georgia undermartial law and dispatched General A. M. Alikhanov-Avarskii with tenthousand troops and several pieces of artillery to quash the uprising. Forfour months Alikhanov held his fire, apparently because he was outnum-bered by the rebellious peasants and because he feared his troops wouldfraternize with them. In July he withdrew his forces completely, only toreturn in October to assault the insurgents in earnest. But it was not un-til January 1906, when the government was reasserting its authoritythroughout the empire, that the insurrection in Georgia was completelycrushed, and then only after much blood had been shed.

The ferocity of popular unrest in the Baltic provinces in 1905 is explainedby the fact that the national movement nurtured resentments of twokinds. On the one hand, the imperial government insisted on the use ofthe Russian language in most classes in the schools and encouraged theOrthodox Church to convert the local population, which to a large ex-tent was Lutheran. On the other hand, the local nobility, who owned adisproportionate share of the land, and the persons who occupied mostof the managerial posts in the factories were overwhelmingly of Germanextraction. Germans also held most of the important positions in the lo-cal organs of government, the police, the courts, and the educational in-stitutions, and tended to treat the Latvians and Estonians with contempt,a pattern of conduct that senior Russian officials often noted in their re-ports to the ministries in St. Petersburg.

Although the Baltic provinces were still largely agricultural, industri-alization had taken root, and Riga and Revel (later Tallin) had becomeimportant centers of economic activity. In Estland, where the cultural



level of the population was fairly high, a wide range of cultural societieshad been formed sometime before 1905 and had exerted a fair amount ofinfluence on workers. As soon as word of Bloody Sunday reached them,virtually all of Revel’s fifteen thousand workers went out on strike, set-ting forth economic demands very similar to those of workers in St. Pe-tersburg. There was relatively little violence, and the workers managed towrest some concessions from employers.

In Riga, however, the strike that began on January 13 was immedi-ately marked by violence, in part because the governor-general, A. N.Meller-Zakomelskii, was especially ruthless in dealing with demonstra-tors. During one skirmish alone soldiers fired into a crowd of workers,killing seventy and injuring about two hundred. Proud of his handiwork,Meller-Zakomelskii informed Tsar Nicholas that he had proved that asmall company of soldiers could control hordes of unruly demonstrators.It was regrettable, the governor-general noted, that more local com-manders were not willing to act as decisively to put an end to unrest.

Actually, his methods were less effective than he believed. Worker un-rest continued in the Baltic provinces for much of the year and soonspread to the countryside, where the Germans were even more prominentthan in the cities. Some 1,500 nobles, most of them German barons,owned about 2.5 million desiatinas of land, whereas 1.3 million Latvianpeasants owned approximately 2 million desiatinas. Many of the poorerpeasants owned between .5 and 5 desiatinas and could eke out a livingonly by becoming agricultural laborers. On several occasions, these agri-cultural workers engaged in strikes and in other forms of protest. Theyrefused to pay taxes and rents, boycotted Russian administrative offices,and attacked the castles and estates of German barons. Because of ashortage of police and troops, the barons assembled their own militaryforces, and by the summer of 1905 bloody clashes between them and therebellious peasants had in effect turned into a civil war. In the fall, thegovernment imposed martial law, which only provoked more attacks onprivate estates. Toward the end of the year, Russian troops entered theBaltic region in force and crushed the peasants and workers’ movement.

Minority groups in several other regions of the empire gave vent totheir aspirations, though the agitation varied in intensity. In Lithuania, forexample, a congress of one hundred delegates in November 1905, con-trolled by the Lithuanian Democratic Party, voted for a democratic systemof government and for autonomy for Lithuania within the empire. In Be-lorussia and the Ukraine nationalist movements were relatively docile,though people began to demand that local languages be adopted in theschools and in institutions of higher learning. Several Ukrainian politicalparties had been formed by 1905, and in June of that year a congress of

two of them (the People’s Party and the Radical-Democratic Party) calledfor the convening of an elected legislature in Kiev with substantial pow-ers in matters affecting the Ukraine. In Finland, the opposition to thetsarist policy of Russification had been intense for some years andreached a high point late in 1905, when the country literally became par-alyzed. Warned by officials that the Russian administration in Finlandfaced a complete loss of authority, the tsar in November beat a hasty re-treat. He issued a manifesto suspending earlier measures (especially themanifesto of 1899) that had stripped the Finns of autonomy. The Finnshad won a major victory, but the unrest continued because by now agrowing number of people demanded complete independence.

Tsarist officials who remained optimistic about the regime’s ability to sur-vive the assault on authority counted on the docility of the peasants,which is surprising since historically unrest in the countryside was by nomeans uncommon. But many officials still labored under the illusion thatpeasants’ loyalty to the tsar, their “little father,” was so deep that theywould not join the revolution.

In fact, unrest in the countryside in 1905 became very intense; accord-ing to reliable estimates, more than three thousand incidents of unrest in-volving peasants occurred throughout the empire. There was no one pat-tern to this peasant movement, which makes generalizations about ithazardous. But it is possible to delineate the rhythm of peasant disorders,though even in this matter caution must be exercised because official re-ports did not distinguish between major and minor outbreaks of violence.Still, the data available are useful in revealing the cyclical nature of thepeasant upheaval. During the first few months of 1905 there were rela-tively few incidents of disorder in the countryside: 17 in January; 109 inFebruary; 103 in March; 144 in April. In May, when the thaw had set in,the number grew substantially—to 299. It remained high for two moremonths: 492 in June and 248 in July. In August and September, whenpeasants were preoccupied with reaping the harvest and sowing the win-ter crop, the number declined to 155 and 71. In October it rose sharply(to 219), and in November and December reached the highest levels of heyear—796 and 575, respectively.

In the Baltic provinces and the Caucasus, peasant unrest was directedat governmental authority, but in European Russia most of the disor-der—slightly more than 75 percent of all incidents—were directed atlandlords’ estates. For the rest, peasants in European Russia attacked theclergy (less than .5 percent of the disorder), kulaks (about 1.4 percent),and merchants, usurers, and liquor stores (roughly 8 percent). In slightly



less than 15 percent of the incidents did governmental authorities bearthe brunt of the peasants’ rage. It is noteworthy that the “rhythm” of thepeasant movement was different from that of the labor movement. Themonths of greatest labor unrest, January, February, and October, werenot the months of greatest peasant unrest, although the last two monthsof 1905 witnessed a considerable amount of disorder in both the indus-trial and the agrarian sectors of the economy. Had the two protest move-ments developed simultaneously throughout 1905, the autocracy wouldhave found itself in an even more precarious condition than it did.

The first major disorder in the countryside broke out in Dmitriev inmid-February 1905 and spread quickly to the neighboring regions in theprovinces of Orel and Chernigov. Although there is no evidence of anoverall plan to the peasant actions, on the local level they were often wellorganized. Straw was burned as a signal to gather for an attack. In somelocalities “initiative groups” of peasants, after receiving the signal, movedfrom one village to another to incite people to action. Larger groups ofpeasants, numbering between six and seven hundred, would then makefor an estate, fire a few shots, break the locks on the granaries, load thegrain on carts, and drive away. Frequently, peasants also divided the live-stock and poultry among themselves and destroyed the offices where therecords of their debts and obligations were stored. In about one-sixth ofthe incidents the peasants pillaged the estates; in about the same propor-tion they resorted to arson. Rarely did they seize privately owned land orharm the landlords physically. Indeed, it was not uncommon for peasantsto tell landlords in advance exactly when they intended to appear; if themasters were still on the premises, they were permitted to witness theproceedings.

Peasants were reluctant to defy authorities in a way that would implya revolutionary challenge to the government. On the contrary, they as-sumed that the tsar had authorized the actions against landlords or that,at the very least, he was disposed to tolerate them. The peasants also as-sumed that after their actions, the owners, no longer considering their es-tates worthwhile, would abandon them; the peasants would then simplytake over the land. These notions may seem odd, but they were in keep-ing with the general outlook of the peasants. The legal concept of privateproperty was alien to them; they believed that all the land belonged to thepeople who had worked it.

One of the most persistent and widespread forms of peasant protestthroughout the revolutionary period from 1905 to 1907 consisted of theillegal felling of trees and seizure of lumber. It has been estimated that 15percent of all the unrest in the countryside involved this sort of action. Itoccurred wherever forests could be found and, significantly, was engaged

in by quite a few well-to-do peasants. The woodlands mostly belonged ei-ther to the government or to landlords, who in recent years had begun toexploit the trees for industrial purposes. Once that happened, peasantswere no longer permitted to roam the forests for firewood, as they haddone in earlier years, and the well-to-do peasants could no longer sell thewood on the market. The unrest in the countryside was also marked bystrikes by agricultural workers, seizures of meadows and pastures by thepeasants, and conflicts over rent between tenants and landlords.

By the early summer of 1905, peasant unrest of one form or anotherhad broken out in sixty-two districts, or 14 percent of European Russia.In some western provinces more than half the districts were affected, andbetween 10 and 30 percent of the peasants joined in the actions. Gener-ally, peasants of all socioeconomic levels took part, and, perhaps surpris-ingly, the poorest peasants and agricultural laborers, who could not sur-vive without their daily earnings, were often the most restrained.

A complex set of factors accounts for the peasant unrest. The mostobvious reason was economic distress, whose causes can be easily sum-marized: the primitive level of agriculture; the inadequacy of peasantlandholdings; the lack of access to meadows, pastures, and forests; thehigh cost of leasing land; and the low wages of agricultural laborers. Nodoubt, peasants were deeply troubled by reports of the government’sbungling of the war—all the more so since they suffered severe hard-ships from large-scale mobilization of their young men, many of whomwere killed or maimed in the Far East. The news of Bloody Sunday andof the unrest in the cities also heightened the peasants’ sense of despair.Then, in the summer of 1905, the harvests were poor, especially in thecentral black-earth regions, causing serious food shortages. Admittedly,these factors are so general that they do not amount to a very satisfac-tory explanation for the outbreak of unrest in 1905. But it is almost al-ways difficult to account for the transformation of discontent into ac-tivism and violence. Moreover, since the peasant movement wasessentially a spontaneous one, unaffected in its initial stages by any rev-olutionary party or the intelligentsia, documentary evidence of motivesis bound to be skimpy.

Although violence was the most dramatic expression of peasant unrest,in the long run the petition campaign in the countryside, which developedin response to the ukase of February 18, was probably more important,for it reflected the politicization of the peasantry. The bureaucracy did itsutmost to prevent the ukase from being disseminated in the villages; wherethat failed, it tried to prevent the peasants from drafting petitions. But bythe spring and early summer, the contents of the ukase had become fairlywidely known in the countryside, in large measure because of the liberal



movement and the liberal zemstvos. In the province of Kherson, for ex-ample, the zemstvo distributed one hundred thousand copies in April,and similar zemstvo initiatives took place in other parts of the empire.Within a few months, some one hundred petitions were sent to St. Pe-tersburg—and this despite initial coolness toward the campaign on thepart of the Socialist Revolutionaries, who feared that the villagers wouldbe diverted from the more militant struggle against the landlords and theauthorities.

Leaders of communes played a decisive role in organizing the petitioncampaign. In addition, peasants discussed their grievances at secret meet-ings in the forests attended by political activists unaffiliated with anycommune. But the final drafts clearly represented the thinking and wishesof the peasants themselves, who voiced their concerns without hesitationand voted on the documents paragraph by paragraph. After mentioningthe peasants’ centuries of devoted service and sacrifice to Russia, the pe-titions would list demands such as the following: the transfer of all stateand landlords’ land to the peasants; the convocation of a democraticallyelected constituent assembly; the granting of civil liberties; the extensionof local self-government, and the liberation from prison of all politicaldissenters. Although the peasants clearly were making common causewith the liberal movement, it was not unusual for their petitions to endwith the following words: “Help us, Your Majesty! Maintain our faith inYour desire to aid us.”

This might suggest confusion on the part of the peasants, but it canalso be taken to mean that in linking their expressions of loyalty to thetsar with demands for extensive economic and political changes, theywere suggesting that their continued allegiance was conditional: the tsarwould retain it only if he embarked on a program of far-reaching reform.As one historian has put it, the petition campaign revealed that “the peas-ant world . . . was revolutionary in spite of itself.”

The militancy—in particular the violence—of the peasants caught thegovernment and landlords by surprise. Initially, in February and March,landlords in many of the affected regions panicked and fled to nearbytowns, where they sought military help to crush the unrest. It took theauthorities a while to react to the disturbances, but once they recoveredfrom the shock, they ruthlessly applied force. Police and soldiers wouldswoop down on villages to search for stolen goods, and people foundwith such goods were flogged without mercy. In one village in ChernigovProvince, a group of peasants were forced to keel in the snow for severalhours, after which they were flogged. Half-dead, the peasants had to becarried away; some were so shaken by the ordeal that they tried to com-mit suicide. In many localities, soldiers sought to intimidate organizers of

disturbances by burning the homes of presumed leaders of the protestmovement. Often military courts were set up to hand down quick and se-vere sentences on people who had engaged in illegal actions or who hadsubmitted demands to landlords accompanied by threats of violence.

By late spring some sectors of the peasantry entered the arena of na-tional politics, an ominous development for the authorities because it fur-ther undermined the official belief in the loyalty of the villagers. Onceagain, as in the case of the soviets, a high tsarist official unwittingly tookan initiative that opened the way for the establishment of a mass organi-zation hostile to the government. The governor of Moscow City urgedsome peasants to issue a statement in support of the war. A number ofpeasants responded to the appeal by holding a congress in May inMoscow, but the gathering showed no interest in the governor’s patrioticproject. Instead, under the influence of reports about the formation ofunions by the intelligentsia, the peasants’ congress announced plans forthe creation of an All-Russian Peasants’ Union, which was to take uplarger economic and political issues. The congress called for the electionof representatives in each guberniia, uezd, and volost to attend a meetingthat would set up the new organization.

On July 31 and August 1, the “Constitutional Assembly of the All-Russian Peasants’ Union” met secretly near Moscow. Considering thepeasantry’s lack of organizational experience, the attendance of morethan one hundred delegates from twenty-two provinces was remarkable.Whether the assembly was the authentic voice of the Russian countrysideis hard to say, but there can be little doubt that the resolutions reflectedthe political drift of a significant portion of the peasantry. The assemblycalled for the abolition of private property in land, the confiscation with-out compensation of all lands owned by the church, the imperial family,and the tsar, the confiscation (partly with and partly without compensa-tion) of privately held lands, and the convocation of a democraticallyelected constituent assembly. As for means to be used to attain thesegoals, the assembly declared itself in favor of both conspiratorial meth-ods and the orderly political processes of a constituent assembly. But itrejected a Bolshevik resolution in favor of a democratic republic, a re-flection of the fact that sentiment for a monarchy was still strong in thecountryside. Finally, the assembly elected a “Bureau of Assistance,”which was to serve as the union’s Executive Committee. The villagers, itwas now clear, had turned to politics on a national scale.

Ultimately, the fate of the autocracy depended on the loyalty of the coun-try’s military forces. If they had refused in large numbers to obey orders,



if they had gone over to the side of striking workers, rebellious peasants,or minority groups in the borderlands, the autocratic regime would nothave survived. It is true that the minister of war, General A. F. Rediger,and some of the senior officers resented the use of the army to suppresscivilian disturbances because it hindered military training and loweredthe army’s prestige among the people. In the end, however, the army car-ried out orders to crush the opposition, although the authorities experi-enced some anxious moments. On July 22, 1905, for example, GeneralO. A. Bertel reported from Orel that his troops lacked enthusiasm for thewar and, more troubling still, some of them had come under the influenceof revolutionary propagandists. Even more serious signs of unrest ap-peared in the navy. Because the operation of modern warships requiredskilled personnel, the navy recruited a fairly large proportion (29 percent)of its men from the cities, the main centers of radical agitation. By mid-1904 disaffection had become apparent among the Black Sea Fleet, wheresome sailors in Sevastopol formed a revolutionary organization that ac-quired a degree of influence in the radical political movement in southernRussia. This organization talked of staging a mutiny throughout the fleet;nothing came of the plan, largely because Social Democrats in the areainsisted that the initiative for armed struggle should come from civilians.

But on June 14, 1905, an incident on the battleship Potemkin, pa-trolling in the Black Sea to test its guns, triggered a mutiny that resultedin carnage in Odessa more severe than that of Bloody Sunday. The menon the ship, some of whom were active revolutionaries, were provoked tomutiny by the mindless conduct of several senior officers. Meat that wasto be served to the sailors turned out to be rotten and when the men com-plained, the executive officer, Giliarovskii, in a fit of rage shot and killedthe sailors’ spokesman, G. M. Vakulenchik. At this—amid shouts of“Grab the rifles and cartridges,” “Hurrah,” and “Long live freedom”—several of Vakulenchuk’s companions grabbed the commander, threwhim overboard, and, as one of the assailants put it, “shot him, out of pity,since he was floundering in the water.” Other members of the crewquickly joined the fray, killing four or five officers, and under the leader-ship of the noncommissioned officer A. N. Matiushenko seized control ofthe ship. The Potemkin then set sail for Odessa, where for about twoweeks strikes and demonstrations had been almost daily events and vio-lent clashes between workers and Cossacks had broken out sporadically.By the time the Potemkin arrived in the harbor during the night of June14 a mass uprising seemed to be imminent.

Though astonished by the appearance of the ship, the strikers anddemonstrators warmly welcomed the mutineers. When a group of Cos-sacks and policemen arrived at the harbor, a red flag was raised as a signal

for sailors on the Potemkin to fire. The Cossacks and policemen imme-diately retreated, whereupon the sailors invited representatives of localradical groups on board to discuss concerted action against the author-ities. The mutineers then placed the body of the slain Vakulenchik, sur-rounded by a body guard, in a prominent place in the harbor. As ex-pected, this attracted a large crowd, which after a few hours turnedviolent, for reasons that are not clear. People looted warehouses at will,carrying away bolts of silk, champagne, tea, clothing, anything theycould find. They also began to set fires, and soon the entire harbor areawas ablaze.

Alarmed by these events and by rumors about the likely spread of themutiny to other ships, the government placed Odessa under martial lawand Tsar Nicholas directed the governor-general of Odessa, I. S.Kakhanov, to “take the most decisive measures to suppress the uprising.”Early on June 16, the army arrived in force and shortly after midnight thetroops began to shoot indiscriminately into the crowd, which washemmed in from all sides. Unable to escape, many people jumped into thesea, where they drowned, and many others perished in the flames. Theshooting lasted several hours and according to credible accounts, twothousand people died and three thousand were seriously injured. Dazedby the massacre and demoralized and intimidated by the sight of largenumbers of soldiers (about twenty thousand in all), the workers ofOdessa became quiescent and many people tried to flee the city. By June20, factories began to operate again and most shops were open.

In the meantime, on June 18 the Potemkin set out to sea, hoping tospark mutinies on other ships, but the response was tepid. Totally iso-lated, the ship sailed toward the Romanian port of Constanza in searchfor supplies and fresh water. The Romanian authorities turned down therequest, but offered instead safe refuge in return for surrendering theship. After some hesitation, the men on the Potemkin accepted the offer.

By itself, the mutiny on the Potemkin did not pose a threat to theregime, but it was nonetheless an embarrassment to the government anda source of concern about the depth of disaffection in the armed forces.Sailors on one of the most prized ships of the fleet had been influenced byrevolutionary propaganda, and the government could not but wonderwhether this was an isolated incident or the harbinger of things to come.As a precautionary measure, it placed some five thousand men of theBlack Sea on leave and for a time completely deactivated the fleet. Thatproved to be no more than a palliative. To many citizens, it seemed asthough the autocracy was losing its grip on the country and that the so-cial fabric was disintegrating.



the failure of reform

In the summer of 1905, the government at last took some measures toshore up its position: it prepared a major reform project and conductedsuccessful negotiations with Japan to end the war. The authorities wereresponding not only to the widespread unrest but also to a new, intensecampaign by liberals for reform. At the first national Congress of CityCouncil Representatives on June 16, attended by 126 delegates fromeighty-seven towns, the constitutionalists were in the ascendancy and suc-ceeded in securing the endorsement of the four-tail suffrage (that is, a suf-frage that was universal, equal, direct, and secret, though limited tomales), which marked a significant shift to the left of this sector of publicopinion. Another sign of the delegates’ leftward drift was their condem-nation of police brutality while refusing to criticize revolutionary terror.Finally, they accepted an invitation from the organizing bureau of thezemstvo movement to attend a congress on July 6 in Moscow. It was tobe the first time that representatives from the two systems of local self-government joined forces, and as such the meeting marked a new stage inthe campaign for a constitutional order.

The authorities, as was their wont, adopted heavy-handed but futilemethods to prevent that meeting of the opposition, which, they feared,would transform itself into a constituent assembly. The congress, at-tended by about two hundred people, did not take so radical a step, butit did formally approve a new tactic that left-wing liberals had been ad-vocating since late in the spring: agitation from below instead of merelyappealing to the autocrat for reform.

This drift to the left led to a split within liberalism. The moderates, ledby D. N. Shipov, continued to favor a special path for Russia, that is,avoidance of a constitution on the Western European model. The JulyCongress of Zemstvo and City Council Representatives did in fact pub-lish a draft of a “Fundamental Law of the Russian Empire,” which pro-vided for the rule of law, civil liberties, freedom of association, and thecreation of a bicameral legislature, one branch of which was to be electedby “every citizen of the male sex.” The draft did not advocate the aboli-tion of the monarchy, but it did propose a sharp curtailment of the tsar’spowers, since it stipulated that the legislature was to control the financesof the state and that no proposal could become law without its approval.In making public the draft constitution the liberals intended to preparepublic opinion for a critical stance toward any concessions the autocracymight offer to the opposition. At the same time, in reasserting their com-

mitment to a constitutional monarchy, the liberals served notice that theirgoals differed sharply from those of the radical opposition.

About four weeks after the congress adjourned, the Bulygin commit-tee, formed in February, at last issued its reform proposal. Nicholas hadcontinued to insist that there was no need to move hastily, but on August6 he was somehow prevailed on to approve the committee’s reform proj-ect, which came to be known as the Bulygin Constitution. Once again,the government misread the mood of the opposition, which could musterno enthusiasm for a concession that met none of its principal demands.The Bulygin Constitution provided for an elected State Duma whosefunctions would be essentially consultative; the government would befree to enact laws with the approval of only the State Council, an upperchamber to be composed of dignitaries appointed by the tsar himself.

The constitution’s value as a concession to the opposition was furtherdiluted by the electoral procedures. The legislature was to be chosen onthe basis of a highly restricted suffrage and the elections were to be indi-rect, in two, three, or four stages. Newspapers subjected the provisionson the suffrage to careful scrutiny and arrived at some astonishing con-clusions. In St. Petersburg, for example, out of a population of approxi-mately 1.4 million, only 7,130 people would be able to vote for electorsin the first stage of the elections; in Moscow, 12,000 out of 1.1 million; inTsaritsyn, 542 out of 85,000. Industrial workers were almost completelydisenfranchised. In the final stage of the elections, 7,591 electors wouldselect the 412 representatives to the State Duma.

Except for the followers of Shipov’s moderate wing of liberalism, everysector of the opposition dismissed the Bulygin Constitution as totally in-adequate. But there were differences among them on tactics. Some liber-als argued in favor of a boycott of the upcoming elections while otherswanted to participate in them because they believed that the parliament,despite all its imperfections, would provide a new arena for open politicalstruggle. In mid-September the Second Congress of Zemstvo and CityCouncil Representatives voted in favor of participation in the elections,but made clear that this was merely a tactic, not an abandonment of theirdemand for a democratically elected parliament with real powers. But be-fore the elections could be held the assault on authority gained such mo-mentum that the government was forced to give up the Bulygin reformand make far more extensive concessions.

For a short period in the summer of 1905 it seemed as though the gov-ernment might be able to strengthen its hand because it had finally takensteps to end the catastrophic war with Japan. Until late in March that



year Nicholas had refused even to consider the possibility of peace, butthen several developments caused him to change his mind. The Russiangovernment failed to secure a loan in Paris, whereas the Japanese hadsucceeded in floating loans in Berlin. The German emperor, convincedthat Russia could not prevail militarily, intimated to the tsar’s officialsthat the time had come to begin negotiations for peace. Probably mostimportant, after the ignominious defeat of the Russian navy in the Straitsof Tsushima on May 14, public support for the war virtually evaporated.When President Theodore Roosevelt offered to act as intermediary be-tween Russia and Japan in arranging for peace, Nicholas consented onJune 7, on the understanding that his decision remain secret until theJapanese also agreed to enter the discussions. The Japanese, militarily andeconomically exhausted, quickly accepted Roosevelt’s proposal thatpeace negotiations be conducted in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Witte, Russia’s negotiator in Portsmouth, had long favored an end tothe war and was prepared to make extensive concessions to the Japanese,including the surrender of Sakhalin Island and the payment of a “dis-guised indemnity.” But in a display of tenacity and independence,Nicholas formulated his own terms for peace, on which he did not wa-ver. Under no circumstances would he agree to conditions that he con-sidered a blot on Russia’s honor. In the end, the Japanese backed downon most issues. Under the Treaty of Portsmouth signed on August 29, theJapanese obtained control over the Liaotung Peninsula, including PortArthur and Dalny (Dairen), and one half of Sakhalin, as well as prepon-derant influence in Korea, but Russia did not have to pay an indemnity.

Throughout the country, the outcome of the negotiations was greetedwith satisfaction. But even this achievement did no more than temporar-ily blunt some of the hostility toward the government. The protest move-ments had by now developed their own momentum and could not bestopped by minor reforms or diplomatic triumphs that many believedwould not have been necessary had the government pursued a judiciousforeign policy.

The truth is that ever since Bloody Sunday it had become increasinglyevident that the revolutionary upheaval was essentially an unpredictableand spontaneous affair. Neither the government nor the leaders of the op-position could control the drift of events. Thus, although illegal groupsof Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, and Socialist Revolutionaries operated in nu-merous cities, none of them planned or directed the strikes in the cities orthe disorder in the countryside. The size of their membership was simplytoo small for them to exert a powerful influence on the course of eventson a national scale, though late in 1905 they did play a significant part inseveral armed uprisings. It has been estimated that in 1905 there were

8,400 “organized Bolsheviks” and an equal number of Mensheviks inRussia. The only known estimate of the Socialist Revolutionary Party’sstrength is for November 1906, at which time there were about fiftythousand “regular and organized” SRs. In the Kingdom of Poland, thesocialists were more successful in attracting members. The “labor-ori-ented parties” (SDKPil, PPS, and the Jewish Bund) increased their com-bined membership from five thousand to about one hundred thousand inthe two years from 1904 to 1906. The Mensheviks in Georgia set downdeep roots among the population and also established a strong organiza-tion. In all of Transcaucasia, several thousand workers and peasants aresaid to have belonged to the Marxist movement.

It is also worth noting that women had launched a protest movementdesigned to secure political equality for them. Some women had partici-pated in the banquets organized by liberals late in 1904, and in February1905 a group of activists established the All-Russian Union for the Equal-ity of Women, whose goal was “freedom and equality before the lawwithout regard to sex.” The organization petitioned the Moscow CityCouncil and the local zemstvo for the right to vote for deputies in thoseinstitutions, and then set up branches throughout the empire. The union’sfirst congress, held in May and attended by seventy delegates, adopted apolitical program that resembled that of leftist liberals, though it con-tained one new demand—full political equality for all citizens. Many lib-erals, including P. N. Miliukov, were not overjoyed. They dismissed thedemands of women as “inopportune,” because they believed that themasses, especially the peasants, were not ready for so radical a measureas women’s equality. The first two congresses of the Zemstvo and CityCouncil Representatives refused to support the women’s demand, but acongress that met in the fall, subjected to intense lobbying, yielded on theissue. The Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries had all along fa-vored universal suffrage without discrimination to sex. But the efforts ofwomen to achieve equality bore few concrete results during the revolution.

One of the more effective and threatening movements from below emergedin Russia in educational institutions, to a large extent the bastion of thewell-to-do. Because the educated classes generally considered universitystudents to be the “barometer of the mood of society,” the ferment in in-stitutions of higher learning after Bloody Sunday received the closest at-tention from the government, opposition groups, and the public at large.On some days, newspapers devoted close to one-fifth of their columns tothe massive student strikes, political meetings, and street demonstrationsthat paralyzed schools. Most of the interest centered on secular institutions



of higher learning—universities and specialized institutes—but much at-tention was also paid to secondary schools, seminaries, and theologicalacademies, many of which participated in the protest movement. Thoughits primary impulse and thrust were political, the protest movement in ed-ucation must also be seen as an attempt to effect important culturalchanges. Quite often, students and their parents demanded changes in theeducational structure, the curriculum, and pedagogy.

On March 18, a Committee of Ministers, bowing to reality, in effectsanctioned the closing of all institutions of higher learning until the fall.The secondary schools, meanwhile, were not closed down en masse, butthis did not mean that they remained quiescent. In many localities of theempire, students submitted petitions for educational reform. Althoughthere were variations among them, some themes appeared in almost allof them, and they can be summarized as follows: elimination of policesurveillance; abolition of obligatory attendance at religious services; im-provement of sanitary conditions; provision for parents to be allowed toselect accommodations for their children; reduction of educational costsand fair distribution of stipends; permission for students to visit theaters,concert halls, libraries, and public reading rooms; access to all books au-thorized by the censorship; the granting to parents of the right to vote inpedagogical councils and to participate in the administration of schools;establishment of honor courts to settle disciplinary cases; and freedom forstudents to hold meetings in school buildings and to organize mutual-aidsocieties. In ethnically non-Russian regions of the empire, students andmany of their parents wanted schools to be mindful of local cultural tra-ditions. Thus, to cite just one example, a petition in Vilna and Kovnoasked that students be permitted to speak Polish and Lithuanian at schooland that the language of instruction be in those languages.

Not until late summer did the government undertake any significantreform in the country’s educational institutions. On August 27, it issueda decree restoring to universities and advanced institutes the autonomythey had been deprived of in 1884. Councils of faculty members couldnow elect the rector and the deans. The councils also assumed authorityover educational matters and student affairs. For example, they couldpermit students to hold meetings on school grounds and, in the event ofa disorder, could close down the institution. Courts of professors were es-tablished to rule on student infractions of disciplinary codes.

Interestingly, General Trepov, the arch-reactionary, was the movingspirit behind the granting of autonomy, an imaginative gesture he wouldlive to regret. It seemed to him that among students “a form of insanity”prevailed, which required a “pathological form of treatment.” By allow-ing them to hold meetings, the “excited hotheads,” Trepov believed,

“would exhaust themselves.” He also thought that the autonomy meas-ure would encourage students to concentrate on affairs at their own cam-puses, making it more difficult for them to maintain contact with otheropposition groups. Trepov was confident that any attempt by students toradicalize workers would be met with ridicule.

Trepov’s strategy misfired completely, as commentators on the rightand left later recognized. In his memoirs, Witte contended that the “de-cree on university autonomy . . . was the first breach through which therevolution, having matured underground, emerged into the broad light ofday.” N. Cherevanin, a Menshevik activist, attached even greater signifi-cance to the decree: “One can say with confidence that the great Octoberstrike was prepared within the walls of the higher educational institutionsin the atmosphere of free speech and ardent exchanges of opinions. . . .Workers, railway employees, representatives of professional groups dis-cussed their needs, decided whether or not to join the strike that hadstarted, organized the forces of the strike, [and] discussed measures to betaken to bring about its spread.”

Initially, students showed little interest in Trepov’s concession and in-sisted that until the political system was fundamentally liberalized the in-stitutions of higher learning should not be reopened. However, at a meet-ing of students in September representing twenty-three institutions fromall over the empire it was decided to adopt a proposal by the MenshevikF. I. Dan that students should abandon the strike, not to pursue theirstudies but rather to open the universities to the people for mass meet-ings. There was considerable disagreement among students as to whetherthey should take an active part in the revolution, but there was little op-position to allowing political agitation in the schools, and that proved tobe critical. At one institution of higher learning after another throughoutthe empire, people thronged to meetings that were blatantly political. Inaddition to university students, workers, soldiers, women, and second-ary-school pupils attended. To be assured admission into the university,many workers in Kiev, at least initially, donned rented double-breastedjackets, attire common among students.

The gatherings were treated to lectures on such subjects as the politicaltasks of the working class and its relations with other classes, the StateDuma, the tactics of progressive parties, the agrarian question, and thephilosophical principles of scientific socialism. To attract the largest pos-sible audience, a speaker on October 4 at the Polytechnical Institute inKiev delivered a political address in Yiddish, surely the first time that hadoccurred at a Russian institution of higher learning. The organizers of themeetings also attended to practical matters. They openly collected moneyfor strike funds and for the acquisition of weapons. Some speakers urged



their listeners to prepare for an armed uprising and for terrorist actionsagainst the authorities. Invariably, the meetings would end with shouts of“Down with the autocracy.” At the Veterinary Institute in Kazan, onespeaker demanded that the portrait of the tsar be removed from the hall.When this was refused, students had the portrait covered with a veil. InKiev, students punched three holes into the portrait of Nicholas I.

A few statistics indicate the popularity of the meetings. Four thousandpeople attended meetings at the University of Kazan on September 20;two thousand at the Polytechnical Institute in St. Petersburg on October1; about thirteen thousand at St. Petersburg University on October 5;four thousand at the University of Kiev on October 9; and ten thousandat the University of Odessa on October 9. At Moscow University on Sep-tember 20, the crowd filled not only all the lecture halls but also the cor-ridors, stairways, and, finally, the porter’s lodge. The meetings would lastfor hours on end, but the crowds never seemed to tire. Nor did they heedthe pleas of university officials to halt the illegal and occasionally dan-gerous gatherings. At St. Petersburg University, so many lecture hallswere in use at night that they feared that the overloaded electrical systemthreatened to ignite, but this, too, dampened no one’s enthusiasm. It hasbeen estimated that in the course of about three weeks in the capitalalone, tens of thousands of workers attended one or more meetings de-voted to political indoctrination.

Dan, who had conceived of the “meetings campaign,” was sure thatthe government would close down all the schools, and this in turn wouldprovoke the masses into a new offensive against the government. Trepov,however, decided against closure because he continued to believe that intime his policy of permitting the popular movement to let off steamwould succeed: people would tire of the endless discussions of revolu-tionary tactics. The authorities in St. Petersburg and in most other citiesdid little except station policemen and soldiers nearby when meetingswere in progress so that “the fire in the buildings would not spread ontothe streets.” In a few places, armed bands directed by plainclothesmenoccasionally assaulted the participants, but generally the authoritieslooked the other way.

The government’s restraint seems to have encouraged defiance. Eventhe Orthodox Church, presumed to be a solid pillar of the autocracy, hadto contend with serious rebellions in its religious schools. In the spring,unrest had erupted at only three seminaries, where discipline and livingconditions were especially harsh. But now, in the fall, strikes broke out atforty-eight of the country’s fifty-eight seminaries, many of them severeenough to prompt officials to close the schools for prolonged periods.With some exceptions, the seminary students submitted demands that

echoed those of students at secular institutions. They asked for betterfood, the abolition of the harsh disciplinary system, the transfer of li-braries to their control, and the introduction of a secondary-schoolcourse of studies that would prepare them for admission to secular insti-tutions of higher learning. The last point underlines the unwillingness ofmany students at the seminaries to prepare for the priesthood. They at-tended church schools mainly because they had no other way to obtainan education.

Early in October, student disorder at all four theological academies (inSt. Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, and Kiev) caused the suspension ofclasses. This turn of events astonished church officials, who consideredthe academies as elitist institutions immune to disaffection. Their stu-dents were carefully selected for both intellectual and personal conduct.Moreover, their graduates faced good prospects for employment as teach-ers or in other moderately well-paying posts. But in the fall of 1905 eventhese students joined the assault on authority, and their principal demandwas that their institutions be granted the kind of autonomy that had beenextended to secular schools. At the Kiev Academy, students also explic-itly referred to a broad political demand, the necessity of “creating a newsystem of life in Russia.” Officials at this institution adopted a harsh ap-proach: they issued an ultimatum warning students that if they did notimmediately certify in writing that they intended to return to class theywould be expelled. The students paid no attention to the ultimatum andtheir academy, as well as the three others, remained closed until after thegeneral strike in October.


chapter three

The General Strike

At the height of the “meeting epidemic,” a new wave of labor unresterupted unexpectedly and within a few days shook the autocratic regimeto its foundations. Although a few opposition leaders had broached theidea of a general strike, no one sensed that the urban labor movementmight be on the verge of its greatest show of strength and its most notabletriumph. Not until vast numbers of workers had laid down their tools didthose leaders appreciate the significance of the strike movement and be-come active in it. In short, the general strike of October 1905 was a classicexample of a momentous historical event that developed spontaneously.

The first signs of labor unrest appeared on September 20, when theprinters in Moscow went on strike in what seemed to be a routine disputeover wages and working conditions. It was initially a peaceful affair, butsince the printing works were near the university, the strikers came intocontact with students and soon began to take part in street meetings de-voted to politics. Attempts by the police to clear the streets resulted insome violence, prompting printers in St. Petersburg to stage a three-daystrike in solidarity with their comrades. Still, the total number of idleworkers was quite small, and on October 1, the Moscow Okhrana re-ported that the situation was under control and that the strike wouldsoon end.

However, there were other indications of restlessness in Moscow. OnOctober 3, several thousand people joined a funeral procession for PrinceS. N. Trubetskoi, who had died unexpectedly at the age of forty-three.The first elected rector of Moscow University, Trubetskoi had been aleading spokesman for moderate liberalism and had become a nationalhero after his address to Tsar Nicholas on June 6 calling for reform. Stu-dents, professors, and representatives from various professional groupsviewed the occasion of his funeral as an opportunity not only to honor adecent man but also to demonstrate their hostility toward the old order.

Although Social Democrats chose not to participate in the procession,some marchers sang revolutionary songs and carried wreaths adornedwith red ribbons. The streets were lined with sympathetic spectators. Itwas, in the words of one eyewitness, “the most grandiose politicaldemonstration to date.”

The funeral itself had not been marred by any incidents, but a crowdof several hundred students who were making their way to a separate lo-cation to listen to revolutionary songs was attacked by Cossacks, who ar-rested more than twenty of the young people. The educated public inMoscow was so enraged that the police felt obliged to issue a statementjustifying its conduct as self-defense against student provocations.

In the meantime, a strike movement of vast dimensions had begun atthe instigation of the Central Bureau of the All-Russian Union of Rail-road Employees and Workers. Formed in April 1905, the railroad union,with a potential constituency of 750,000 workers of widely differingeconomic and political interests, had adopted a nonpartisan stance, fo-cusing on such broad political goals as the convocation of a constituentassembly and the attainment of political and civil rights for the people.The central bureau, however, which ran the organization, sympathizedwith the aims of the radical parties, and at the union’s second congress inJuly it obtained authorization to agitate for a general strike of railwayworkers in support of the organization’s aims and to call such a strikewhenever conditions seemed propitious.

Late in September the government unwittingly played into the handsof the militants in the union by convoking a congress in the capital ofunion delegates to consider certain controversial changes in the rules gov-erning the pension fund that the authorities wished to introduce. Sincemost of the delegates would be either professionals or managers of thepension fund, the government believed that it would be able to dominatethe proceedings. The delegates, however, rejected the man selected by thegovernment to act as chairman and chose instead one of their own, a cer-tain M. D. Orekhov. It was a dramatic and unexpected victory for thecentral bureau, which had initially opposed the pension congress for fearthat it would divert workers from political concerns. The bureau nowviewed the gathering as a rallying point and as a possible catalyst for amassive strike movement. It decided to expand the local, uncoordinatedstrikes that were already a frequent occurrence by calling for a generalstrike of all the railways, to start on October 4.

Within two days, the work stoppage gained momentum, fueled in partby rumors that turned out to be false that some delegates to the pensioncongress had been arrested. By October 10, service in Moscow stoppedcompletely, and since Moscow was the hub of the entire railroad system,

68 The General Strike

The General Strike 69

the strike there had enormous impact on transportation throughout theempire. The strikers sent delegations to Witte, then chairman of the Com-mittee of Ministers, and to Prince M. I. Khilkov, minister of transporta-tion, to persuade them to come out in support of a constituent assemblyand some economic concessions. Witte’s response that the strike wouldhave to end before discussions about reform could be undertaken drovethe congress, some of whose delegates had been reluctant about a generalstrike, fully over to the side of the central bureau. Once the congress of-ficially opted for the strike, the railway workers in St. Petersburg gavetheir unanimous support to it, and by October 16 the strike had spread toevery line in the country.

Meanwhile, the strike had also garnered wide support throughout so-ciety. On October 11 mass meetings at the University of St. Petersburg, to-taling about thirty thousand people, unanimously adopted a resolution tojoin the all-Russian railway strike, and within the next few days industrialworkers, telegraph operators, salesmen, pharmacists, and employees ofprivate banks, government offices, and at city utilities failed to show up atwork. University students as well as high school students stopped attend-ing class. Even the Imperial Theater, private theaters, and the MariinskiiBallet closed their doors. Food stores opened only for three hours a day.Surprisingly, a fair number of revolutionary activists initially remained dif-fident about the mass action. The Bolsheviks in Moscow, distrustful of anyaction not directed at a seizure of power, failed to come out in support ofthe general strike until October 10, and the Bolsheviks in St. Petersburgwaited even longer, until the night of October 12.

The crippling strike caused severe hardships in the cities and towns.Food supplies became scarce and rose dramatically in price; in Moscowcitizens panicked because the water had become muddy, the result, manybelieved, of contamination by workers. The governor-general tried tocope with the shortage of medicines by ordering military pharmacies tofill civilians’ prescription, but he warned that supplies were running low.Large numbers of the deceased could not be buried for lack of trans-portation; as one newspaper reported, “The mortuaries at city hospitalsare overflowing with bodies.” Fearing a catastrophe, the city councildeputy A. I. Guchkov declared that “the present strike can only be ex-plained as a psychosis that has seized our society.” If Guchkov was right,then the disease was highly contagious. By October 16, virtually every ur-ban center in the empire was affected by it. According to reliable esti-mates, more than two million workers and other employees joined thegeneral strike. The empire was paralyzed. Deprived of many vital serv-ices, people believed that they were “experiencing the predicament ofRobinson Crusoe.”

On the whole, the strike was peaceful, largely because there was anoutlet for the people’s anger and frustration. They would attend innu-merable meetings, most often at institutions of higher learning, whereradicals excoriated the government and called for an end to the auto-cratic regime. But there was another reason for the absence of violence,the reluctance of the authorities to resort to force against a movementthat was supported by so many different social groups. The support lentby the middle class was, in fact, astonishing. Some industrialists promisedto pay their workers for days they missed during the strike—a promisethat was kept. Industrialists in Moscow organized breakfast meetings atthe Metropol Hotel to collect money for the families of striking workers.On one such occasion they collected fourteen thousand rubles. At a dif-ferent meeting, middle-class participants contributed six hundred threerubles for Social Democratic workers. Some affluent sympathizers set upcanteens in their homes for children of destitute families. The cooperationof the various social groups continued for the duration of the strike, inlarge part because the emphasis was on one overriding political goal, theelimination of the autocratic regime; differences over economic and so-cial issues were downplayed.

Although there were a few incidents of violence and some attempts bystrikers to intimidate colleagues who refused to leave their jobs, the gen-eral strike was in many ways an extraordinary event, remarkable for thehigh degree of discipline and self-sacrifice shown by masses of people. Itis no exaggeration to say that in October 1905 the industrial proletariatemerged as an organized—and for a time also the most dynamic—forcein the revolution. It clearly initiated the strike, kept it going, and providedmost of the cannon fodder for the assault on the old order. The workersprobably could not have succeeded in bringing the government to itsknees without the support of white-collar employees, professionals, andthe middle class. But if the workers had not taken the lead, there wouldhave been no general strike in the first place. In the nine months since theBloody Sunday, the proletariat had undergone a notable process of politi-cization, and the autocracy’s failure to introduce fundamental reformshad induced a decisive shift to the left in society at large. It was the con-gruence of these two developments that furnished the essential backdropto the general strike, the opposition’s most impressive challenge to the au-tocracy during the revolution.

The establishment of the soviet in St. Petersburg further testified to thegrowing political activism of the working class. On the evening of Octo-ber 13, about forty deputies, more or less formally elected by workers atthe behest of Menshevik agitators, met at the Technological Institute toset up a “strike committee” to provide unified direction for the move-



ment now engulfing the entire city. The newly formed committee calledon all factories to elect deputies, one for every 500 workers, for a total of562. On October 17, the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, as it came to becalled, elected an Executive Committee of fifty, which made the major de-cisions, although some issues were publicly debated and voted on by theentire soviet. After electing as chairman G. S. Khrustalev-Nosar, a left-lib-eral lawyer, the soviet took pains to adopt a neutral stand on partisanpolitics, which was one of the reasons for its great popularity. Leon Trot-sky (L. D. Bronstein), who had aligned himself with the Mensheviks, wasthe only revolutionary Marxist of any prominence to play an importantrole in the soviet. The Bolsheviks initially favored the soviet, but as soonas it assumed political leadership of the St. Petersburg workers they be-came hostile to it because they were uncomfortable with any organiza-tion that strove to be nonpartisan. Lenin did not come to St. Petersburguntil November and he apparently succeeded in persuading his colleaguesto desist from attacking the soviet outright. He attended only a few ses-sions of the Executive Committee and made no significant contributionto its work. However, his rivals for proletarian support, the Mensheviks,enthusiastically supported the soviet and assumed a position of leader-ship in it. For the Mensheviks, the creation of the soviet was part of theirlarger plan to create a broad proletarian political party in which workerswould play a key role.

The St. Petersburg Soviet became the headquarters of the generalstrike, exerting pressure on wavering workers, intimidating industrialistsdisinclined to close their factories, and keeping people informed of devel-opments in the work stoppage by means of a newspaper that had a run ofthirty-five to sixty thousand copies. The soviet also directed food storesto open during specified times of the day, and it proclaimed freedom ofthe press. But in a less liberal spirit it directed vendors not to sell “officialpublications.” The kiosks of vendors who disobeyed this directive wereto be destroyed and the offending newspapers confiscated. On variousother matters, such as the removal of the army from the city and thegranting of funds to the soviet to form a workers’ militia, the soviet ap-plied pressure on the city council to take action. The council, unwillingto offend the soviet, neither approved nor rejected the requests. By thetime the general strike ended, the soviet in the capital had arrogated to it-self powers normally exercised by a governmental authority.

In all, workers in some forty to fifty cities formed local soviets in thefall of 1905; in addition, soldiers and peasants established their owncouncils in several regions, bringing the total to about eighty. The activi-ties of these soviets varied considerably. Several acted primarily as strikecommittees, while a few in the mining districts of the Urals and the

Donets Basin concentrated on preparing for an armed struggle. The latterdid not last very long, and consequently not much is known about them.In most of the soviets, Social Democrats predominated: in Odessa, Kiev,and Baku, and in the south of Russia generally, the Mensheviks had theupper hand; in Moscow, Kostroma, and Tver, and in the cities of theDonets Basin, the Bolsheviks were ascendant.

the government’s response to the strike

The government, under growing pressure from various sectors of thepublic to put an end to the strike, vacillated for several days and then de-cided on a course that proved to be unfeasible. On October 12, Nicholasordered General Trepov to deal vigorously with the unrest. Trepov im-mediately sent a directive to all police chiefs in all provinces with a siz-able revolutionary movement to “act in the most drastic manner” to pre-vent disorder, “not stopping at the application of force.” A day later, heordered the governor-general of Moscow to prevent any public meetingthat had not been sanctioned, if necessary “with all means, including theovert use of force.” Most dramatically, on October 14 Trepov issued aproclamation to the people of St. Petersburg that was printed on the firstpage of the daily newspapers and posted on walls and fences. Theproclamation promised that the authorities would protect lives and prop-erty but also warned citizens that the police and army had been orderedto put down all disturbances with the “most decisive measures,” and thatthey had been advised “not to use blanks [or] to spare bullets.”

Given the tense atmosphere in St. Petersburg, it is hard to imagine a gov-ernment action less calculated to restore calm. On the very day the procla-mation was distributed, some forty thousand people defiantly streamedinto the streets near the university. In addition, every auditorium in themain building was filled to capacity with men and women from various la-bor unions. But the army and police were nowhere to be seen. Apparently,the authorities realized that any attempt to disperse the crowd would haveled to a bloodbath even more terrible than the one on January 9.

Several advisers to the tsar now concluded that only political reformcould bring the crisis to an end. The main spokesman of this group wasWitte, who had recently returned from the Japanese peace negotiationswith a greatly enhanced reputation. Witte still believed that a progressiveautocracy with far-sighted leadership was the best form of governmentfor Russia, but he recognized that in view of the revolutionary assault onauthority it was now impossible to maintain the old order. Reluctantly,



the tsar accepted Witte as the man to deal with the crisis. The problemwas that however much Nicholas recognized Witte’s abilities, he couldnot abide the man, believing him to be overbearing and dangerously am-bitious. At the same time, Witte nurtured a strong dislike for themonarch, whom he regarded as shallow, indecisive, and utterly devoid ofpolitical wisdom. Still, Witte, profoundly patriotic and eager for glory,could not resist the chance of being the savior of Russia, the man whowould restore calm and stability.

The reform that Witte had in mind was an imperial manifesto grant-ing civil and political rights to the people and providing for the establish-ment of a “unified ministry” headed by a prime minister who would haveprimary responsibility for running the government. Under the prevailingsystem, each minister reported directly to the tsar, an arrangement thatmade it possible for ministers to pursue contradictory policies. Witte wasconfident that his proposed concessions, which would amount to the cre-ation of a constitutional order without reducing the monarchy to politi-cal impotence, would succeed in detaching the moderates from the oppo-sition and thus place the country back on an even keel. This strategy wasto become the core of Witte’s policies over the next few months.

In an audience with the tsar at which he outlined his strategy, Wittepointed out that the only alternative to his approach was the appoint-ment of a dictator, who would have to subdue the opposition by force.He emphasized his preference for a political solution, but, as was hiswont in the presence of the sovereign, Witte did not insist that his pro-posal was necessarily the best one.

After extensive discussion with his advisers, Nicholas indicated partialacceptance of Witte’s program, the creation of a “unified ministry.” Ap-parently, the tsar would not go any further because he suspected Witte oftrying to enhance his own prestige, and even of planning to become“president of the All-Russian Republic.” But Witte insisted that the par-tial implementation of his program would not succeed in ending the tur-bulence. Nicholas now called another meeting of advisers, including hiscousin, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, the only person who possessedall the qualifications for the post of dictator: he was a zealous defenderof the autocracy, enjoyed the confidence of the sovereign, and was in thegood graces of the imperial family. But Nikolai Nikolaevich had reachedthe conclusion that there was no acceptable alternative to political re-form, and it was only after a dramatic meeting between him andNicholas that the latter finally decided, on October 17, to accept Witte’sproposal. According to Witte, when Count Frederiks, the minister of thecourt, informed the grand duke that the tsar wanted him to take over asdictator, the following scene was played out: “The Grand Duke took a

revolver from his pocket: ‘You see this revolver,’” he said, “‘I am nowgoing to the Tsar and will implore him to sign the manifesto and Witte’sprogram; either he signs or I will shoot myself.” “With these words,”Frederiks continued, “he left me. After a while, the Grand Duke returnedand transmitted to me an order to rewrite in final form the Manifesto andreport, and then . . . bring them to the sovereign for his signature.”

Nicholas had not changed his mind because he was persuaded of thewisdom of restructuring Russia’s political system. He realized that he hadno choice. As he put it in a letter to his mother, “From all over Russiathey cried for it, they begged for it, and around me many—very many—held the same views. . . . There was no other way than to cross oneselfand give what everyone was asking for.” Even Trepov, one of the mostunyielding hard-liners, warned that unless Witte’s reform proposals wereimplemented, order could be restored only by means of a bloodbath, andeven then he was not certain of success.

The Manifesto of October 17 was quite brief, basically an outline ofreform the government intended to introduce in the coming months. Itwould grant such civil liberties as personal inviolability, freedom of con-science, speech, assembly, and the right of association, and it promisedthat in the future no measure would become law without the approval ofan elected State Duma. The last point was critical, for by conceding thathe was no longer the sole repository of political power, Nicholas didwhat he had vowed never to do: he abandoned the principle of autocracy.The liberal press rightly hailed the Manifesto as a “great historicalevent,” the “first step toward a Russian constitution,” the beginnings ofa “new order,” the triumph of a “peaceful national revolution.” With rel-atively few exceptions, Russians from all walks of life greeted the Octo-ber Manifesto with enthusiasm. There could be no doubt that a decisivemoment had been reached in the revolution.

In the view of many historians, the issuance of the Manifesto markedthe high point of the revolution. There is much to be said for this inter-pretation, for the dismantling of the autocratic regime had been the cen-tral demand of the liberals who had launched the campaign against theauthorities in the fall of 1904, the real starting point of the upheaval.

Within a matter of days, most workers, who were beginning to suffergreat hardships, returned to their jobs despite the urging of the St. Pe-tersburg Soviet on October 18 that the strike be continued until “such amoment when conditions necessitate a change in tactics.” One day later,when it became evident that workers were following their own instincts,the soviet quickly retreated and voted to end the strike.

Social Democrats of both persuasions stridently denounced the Man-ifesto as a hoax and some left-wing liberals, most notably Miliukov,



dismissed the concessions with the words “nothing is changed: the war[against the old order] continues.” But even among those who welcomedthe Manifesto there were many who harbored serious doubts the govern-ment’s determination to implement it fully. Witte, newly appointed primeminister of a “unified government,” understood that he faced an enor-mous challenge: not only did he have to draft a constitution, but also hehad to change the administration’s conduct of affairs quickly to persuadethe country that the old methods of rule would in fact be abandoned.With a nice sense for public relations, he invited several editors of leadingnewspapers to his office to convey his earnest desire for public support.Witte frankly admitted that his policies could not succeed without thebacking of the “vital social forces” of the country and that the presscould help by fostering public confidence in the new government. Butthen he added, ominously, that only after calm had been restored, wouldit be possible to carry out the reforms that had been promised.

In another effort to secure public support, Witte invited several moder-ate liberals to join his government, but when the prime minister indicatedthat he planned to appoint as minister of internal affairs P. N. Durnovo, awell-known reactionary with a dubious moral reputation, the liberals im-mediately turned him down. It was a missed opportunity for both Witteand the liberals and it is still a mystery why Witte insisted on Durnovofor so critical a post. The most plausible explanation for the prime min-ister’s stubbornness is that he wanted a strongman in that sensitive postto counterbalance the influence of the liberals. In any case, Witte did notgive up and turned to other liberals for support, but none would serve inhis cabinet. Inevitably, the approaches to the liberals embarrassed theprime minister, and the tsar was thoroughly dismayed at his courting of“various extremists, especially as all these talks appear in the press thenext day, and as often as not are distorted.”

It is an open question whether the liberals acted wisely in turningdown Witte’s overtures. Though certainly not a democrat or a parlia-mentary constitutionalist, Witte did believe in the weeks after the generalstrike that major reforms were necessary. Yet within the highest officialcircles he could count on few to support such a policy. The presence ofcommitted liberals in the government might have strengthened his re-formist proclivities and added weight to the argument that the countrycould be pacified only by political means. If after a few weeks it becameevident that they were impotent or, worse, hostages to the reactionaries,the liberals could have resigned. It is not certain that such a course of ac-tion would have irreparably harmed the cause of constitutionalism.

Nevertheless, the liberals were in a difficult position. Their rebuff ofWitte was, no doubt, partly motivated by principle. But political consid-

erations also played a role, perhaps a decisive one. Joining the cabinet,the liberals feared, would cost them the support of substantial sectors ofsociety, which harbored strong doubts about Witte’s true intentions.“The gentlemen whom . . . [Witte] has consulted,” the British ambassa-dor to St. Petersburg reported, “confess to him that their power wouldvanish as soon as they became ministers.”

In the end, the cabinet of fourteen people that Witte assembled allcame from the bureaucracy, which did not enjoy the confidence of soci-ety. Only one member of society, Prince S. D. Urusov, agreed to serve inthe government, as assistant minister of internal affairs. But by himself hecould not exert much influence on government policy, and in any case, hesoon resigned in disgust when he discovered that a high official in theDepartment of Police had helped incite pogroms.

new political parties

The political landscape was transformed by the general strike and theOctober Manifesto. Vast numbers of people were now politicized, andactivists formed three new parties, two of which were to play a key rolein national affairs over the following decade, when a primary issue wasthe consolidation of Russia’s transition from monarchical rule to repre-sentative government. Liberals had taken the initial steps toward organ-izing a party during the summer so as to mobilize popular support for theelections announced by Bulygin on August 6. Their efforts came tofruition during the general strike, when the Constitutional DemocraticParty (or Party of People’s Freedom, generally known as Kadets) held itsfounding congress in Moscow (October 12–18). Somewhat later, Shipovand Guchkov took the lead in forming the Union of October 17 (Octo-brists), which spoke for conservative liberalism. Finally, the ultraconser-vatives founded the Union of the Russian People (URP) to activate themasses to defend the old order.

The Kadet Party was essentially a movement of professionals and lib-eral landowners who subscribed to the political views of the zemstvo con-stitutionalists and the Union of Liberation. The professional class pre-dominated in the party’s leadership. Although the party intended to be“above class” and to represent the interests of the entire population, itnever attracted many workers or peasants. Nor did it succeed in gaininga foothold in commercial and industrial circles. Nonetheless, politicallythe Kadets achieved a remarkable degree of prominence, and, eventually,influence, in large measure because their leaders were highly intelligent,



articulate, determined, and skillful as politicians. Several Kadet leaderswere also first-rate journalists, and they had at their disposal several dis-tinguished newspapers and journals, which became their main weapon inthe political struggles. By January 1906, the Kadets succeeded in creatingan impressive organization. Approximately one hundred thousand peo-ple belonged to the party, which maintained local groups in twenty-nineprovinces as well as party sections in many districts and cities. More thanone thousand activists ran the affairs of the movement at the local level.

The Kadet program was progressive and generally judicious, eventhough their tactics were often militant. The program called for a dem-ocratic system of government, the rule of law, a progressive system oftaxation, an eight-hour workday, and the distribution, “insofar as isnecessary,” of “land alienated from private landlords and paid for by thegovernment at equitable, not market, prices.” Whether the monarchyshould be retained was left open. With this broad program, combiningpolitical liberalism and social reform, the Kadet leaders hoped, on theone hand, to steer a course between revolution and reaction and, on theother, to preserve the unity of the opposition. Probably the Kadets’greatest handicap was that they were liberal democrats in the WesternEuropean mold in a country without a strong tradition of hospitality toliberal ideas.

To the right of the Kadets stood the Union of October 17, which maymore properly be considered a political association than a political party.It never attained the status of a mass movement, relying for its supporton commercial and industrial interests in the cities and the moderatelyconservative nobility in the provinces. Not until late in 1906 did A. I.Guchkov, a wealthy Muscovite industrialist, succeed in imposing an or-ganizational structure on the union thereby transforming it into a party.Opposed to the arbitrariness of the autocracy and bureaucracy, the Oc-tobrists were generally content with the October Manifesto, which theyconfidently expected to lead to a political system according civil rightsand equality before the law to all. They considered additional reforms de-sirable and believed that they could be achieved through the State Duma.

Unlike the Kadets, the Octobrists were strong supporters of themonarchy, both as a symbol of national unity and as a center of politicalauthority. They opposed calling a constituent assembly, which, they held,would signify a complete break with tradition, and much more than theKadets, they tolerated and even sanctioned repressive measures againstrevolutionaries. The Octobrists supported the right of workers to formunions and to strike over economic issues, but condemned attempts tomake union membership or participation in strikes compulsory, and theyrepudiated political strikes. The Octobrists favored various measures to

aid the peasants economically and were prepared, in “cases of state sig-nificance,” to support the alienation of some private lands if these meas-ures proved to be “insufficient.”

Nationalism was a key element in Octobrist political outlook. Anyplan that even remotely suggested a federal system of government wasanathema to the party’s leader, Guchkov. He opposed political autonomyfor Poland as well as all schemes to decentralize the legislative tasks ofthe government, though he did favor civil liberties and cultural autonomyfor minorities. He was prepared to make an exception for Finland,which, he believed, should retain its autonomous status so long as it re-mained part of the empire.

Late in 1905 and for about two years thereafter, the Octobrists com-manded too little mass support to play a major political role, butnonetheless their impact on the course of the revolution was not negligi-ble: in creating a movement that strongly supported the October Mani-festo, they accorded a measure of legitimacy to the new order.

Supporters of the old order were reluctant to form a political party be-cause that ran counter to their belief in the untrammeled authority of theautocrat. But early in November 1905 Dr. A. I. Dubrovin, having con-cluded that a mass party of the right was necessary to counter the left andthe liberals, established the Union of the Russian People, which, despiteits very small following, became by far the most important of all theright-wing organizations among the approximately two hundred thatmade their appearance during the revolutionary period. Although someprofessionals, businessmen, landowners, and lesser officials attended themeeting that founded the movement, the upper reaches of Russian societywere not represented at all at that gathering and never became prominentin the URP leadership. Beyond that, not much can be said with certaintyabout the social composition of the movement, except that it apparentlyattracted the support of some Lumpenproletariat (“backward provin-cials”) as well as some disgruntled members of other classes, and that theleaders of the movement regarded themselves as spokesmen for a partic-ular middle-class stratum whose position was especially precarious andthreatened by the revolution.

The single most important feature of the URP’s ideology was anti-Semitism, derived mainly from two spurious documents that until 1919were hardly known outside Russian right-wing circles, the Protocols ofthe Elders of Zion and the Rabbi’s Speech. According to these twoworks, the elders of international Jewry were engaged in an internationalconspiracy to take control of Europe and Russia by means of revolutionsstaged by Christians against their own leaders. Some URP leaders advo-cated mass slaughter of the Jews to solve the Jewish problem, but in its



official pronouncements the URP urged the authorities to do everythingin their power to encourage Jews to emigrate to Palestine. The Jews whoremained in Russia should be regarded as foreigners “but without any ofthe rights and privileges extended to all other foreigners.” The union, infact, regarded only the Great Russians, Little Russians, and White Rus-sians as “native Russians,” defined in the official organ as people “whosefather and mother, grandfathers, and forefathers were born in Russia,chose the Orthodox religion as their own, and chose the Russian lan-guage.” All other national groups within the empire were “aliens” whodid not merit rights equal to those of the “natives” and must not begranted political or cultural autonomy.

The URP sought to influence national politics in two ways. It engagedin a massive propaganda campaign, bombarding the tsar with messagesof loyalty, and on occasion, the URP organized street demonstrations, inmost cases not well attended. The URP’s second tactic was more sinister:it organized “armed squads” that assassinated political leaders of the op-position.

The tsar looked with favor on the union and formally received its del-egates, including Dubrovin, at his court in Tsarskoe Selo to listen atten-tively to their expressions of loyalty. He also accepted the gift of two URPbadges, one for himself and one for his son, and indicated that he agreedwith his visitors that the autocracy must be retained. For the ruler and hisassociates, the very existence of such organizations was heartening, be-cause it allowed them to believe that far from being isolated, they actu-ally enjoyed a groundswell of support among the people. Such reassur-ance could only have stiffened their resolve to hold the line against theforces of change.

concessions endangered

The October Manifesto, the opposition’s most stunning victory over theautocracy in 1905, led not to domestic tranquillity but to a new round ofunrest that further undermined the social and political order. None of theenthusiasm for the October Manifesto translated into political supportfor the author of the document, Count Witte, who had been appointedprime minister on October 17. At the head of a system of governmentthat was, in the words of one observer, an “absolute chaos,” he immedi-ately faced an array of intractable problems.

First of all, more than one million soldiers were still in the Far Eastclamoring to be demobilized. Frequent strikes on the railroads and ad-

ministrative confusion had caused delays of up to six to eight weeks inbringing the men home. Frustrated and angry, many soldiers became un-ruly. Witte was also short of funds to run the government and it took himclose to six months to negotiate a loan with Western European govern-ments. Moreover, Witte encountered great resistance from established in-stitutions in implementing the Manifesto. The new chief procurator ofthe Most Holy Synod of the Russian Church, Prince A. D. Obolenskii,for example, complained that he “had the greatest difficulty” in persuad-ing the synod to send out a pastoral letter urging the faithful to “acceptthe new order of things.” Witte himself struggled to find competent mento serve in his administration, and to make matters worse, two days afterissuing the Manifesto, Tsar Nicholas began to criticize his chief ministerfor inaction and disorganization. Early in November rumors began to cir-culate that Witte would be dismissed and replaced by a reactionary whowould assume the powers of a military dictator.

That did not happen, but Witte never exercised the authoritative posi-tion in the cabinet that he had demanded and had been promised. When-ever Nicholas wanted some action taken that he suspected Witte wouldoppose, he dealt directly with other ministers. Moreover, Trepov, the em-inence grise ever since Bloody Sunday, continued to serve as the tsar’s ad-viser and was appointed to the prestigious position of commandant of thecourt. In his new position, Trepov controlled the flow of information toand from the tsar and thus wielded enormous influence over policy. “Igive . . . [Trepov] Witte’s bulky memoranda to read,” the tsar told hismother early in 1906, “and then he reports on them quickly and con-cisely. This is of course a secret to everybody but ourselves.” To add toWitte’s burdens, the extremists on the right viciously attacked him, hunt-ing him down “like a wild beast.” The extraordinary pressures took theirtoll. He was so overworked that six days after assuming his new office hewas thoroughly exhausted.

Nonetheless, Witte quickly made several moves in keeping with thespirit of the Manifesto. On October 21 a ukase was issued at his initia-tive granting amnesty to various categories of political prisoners and re-ducing the punishments of others. The opposition was not satisfied, butthe ukase did lead to the release of many political prisoners; in Warsawalone 1,511 people were freed. Then, on October 22 the government is-sued another manifesto abolishing all measures taken since 1899 in vio-lation of Finland’s legal system, thus restoring the rights that the Finnishpeople had enjoyed during the period of autonomy. Late in November, inanother conciliatory gesture, the government added 133 Russian townsto the list of places where Jews were permitted to reside. Still, Witte failedto enlist the support of liberals, which he considered essential to provide



his government an aura of legitimacy, and so long as that was the case hisreform program remained in grave jeopardy.

Most troubling, Witte’s attempts to establish his government’s authoritytook place against a background of mass violence, one of the more puz-zling outbursts of raw passion in 1905. For nine months, pressure frombelow for reform had seemed irresistible and the government, withoutmuch visible popular support, appeared to be helpless. From time totime, defenders of the status quo had shown signs of life, but their effortson behalf of the autocracy had been sporadic and ineffective. Then, pre-cisely at the moment when the autocracy was at its weakest, when it hadbeen compelled to grant its first major concession, the defenders of theold order unleashed their most intense and ferocious attack on the advo-cates of change. This resort to brute force to silence the tsar’s criticsthreatened to undermine the new order before it could be consolidated.

The violence that erupted in the streets and countryside of the empirewas as sudden as it was widespread. Although Jews were the principal fo-cus of the pogroms, they were not the only ones to come under attack.The rampaging mobs also targeted the intelligentsia—anyone, in fact,who was presumed to have participated in the movement to extract theManifesto of October 17 from the tsar or who simply rejoiced in it.

The disorder began on October 18, the day after the concession wasmade, and within four days it seemed to one sober commentator that“complete governmental anarchy” prevailed in Russia. The shock to so-ciety was profound. “No one thought that the first day of a Russian con-stitution would end in tragedy.” After seven days the mobs largely ranout of steam, but sporadic incidents continued until late November.

There was no one pattern to the disorder. For the most part, it appearsto have started when organized gangs attacked demonstrators celebrat-ing the opposition’s victory over the autocracy. Often, Jews took part inthe celebrations, and that served as a pretext for specifically anti-Jewishriots, but sometimes pogroms erupted after rumors circulated that Jewshad perpetrated acts of wanton violence. When Jews in Kiev were ac-cused of having set fire to the Golosoeevskaia Monastery and murderingall the monks, rioters destroyed stores in the Jewish bazaar, killed twelvepeople, and injured forty-four. In some localities, the pretext for apogrom was the charge that Jews were planning to place one of theircoreligionists on the throne. In still others, patriotic processions—occa-sionally inspired by ecclesiastics—were organized to counteract the cele-brations and then degenerated into orgies of violence.

Funerals for people slain by right-wingers were yet another occasion

for mass violence, because such events often turned into demonstrationsagainst the old order. The most notable such funeral took place inMoscow on October 20 for N. E. Bauman, a thirty-two-year-old Bolshe-vik with impressive credentials as an activist, who had been shot and thenbeaten to death by a worker sympathetic to the Black Hundreds. Thestage was set for a spectacular procession, organized by the Bolsheviksand attracting many thousands of ordinary people. At the conclusion ofthe procession, which had been entirely peaceful, about four thousandmourners gathered at the university, where they unexpectedly came underattack, first from Black Hundreds and then from Cossacks. To ward offthe assault, revolutionary militiamen with the mourners fired their re-volvers, and in the ensuing exchange of gunfire six marchers were killedand thirty injured, half of them seriously. The authorities promised toconduct a “strict investigation” of the incident, but it soon became evidentthat they were not interested in bringing right-wing criminals to justice.When a prime suspect in Baumann’s murder, a certain N. F. Mikhailin,was apprehended, the procurator released him as soon as a mob of BlackHundreds besieged the courthouse demanding that he be handed over tothem. In the end, Mikhailov was tried and sentenced to two years of hardlabor, but the tsar pardoned him. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917,Mikhailin was tried again; this time he was shot after a court found himguilty of Bauman’s murder.

For several days attacks on Jews occurred with such frequency thatnewspapers carried special sections entitled “Jewish pogroms,” and theytold only part of the story. All in all, according to the most reliable esti-mates, 690 anti-Jewish pogroms occurred, primarily in the southwesternprovinces; 876 people were killed and between 7,000 and 8,000 injured.In a few cities the Jews lost property estimated at more than 1 millionrubles. Altogether, the damage to property during the pogroms has beencalculated at 62 million rubles.

In accounting for the disorder, critics of the autocracy claimed that thehooligans had been organized by reactionaries and abetted by officials atevery level of government. Some critics also contended that the govern-ment in St. Petersburg had actually planned the violence so as to deal acrushing blow to all who had worked to wrest the Manifesto from thetsar. These charges cannot be dismissed out of hand. The reports that thepolice looked the other way during pogroms and helped to organize pa-triotic processions are simply too numerous. In several localities, investi-gations made shortly after the unrest confirmed that the police had in-deed helped to foment them. Moreover, the Bureau of Investigation of theJewish Pogroms (apparently set up by the government itself) conducted ageneral inquiry and concluded that “in almost every pogrom local au-thorities participated actively.”



But this still leaves open the question of the culpability of the govern-ment in St. Petersburg. On the one hand, it was widely known that TsarNicholas viewed the violence against Jews as a natural reaction of loyalcitizens to the excesses of the left. And in February 1906 some highlydamaging evidence of complicity by the authorities in St. Petersburg cameto light. A. A. Lopukhin, director of police in the Ministry of Internal Af-fairs, informed Prime Minister Witte that in October and November1905 a secret press in police headquarters in the capital had printed“thousands of proclamations” urging “all true Russians to rise and ex-terminate all foreigners, Jews, Armenians, etc. and all those who were ad-vocates of reform and talked of restricting the autocratic power of theSovereign.” It also emerged that General Trepov had personally madecorrections on the proofs of some of the proclamations. After an investi-gation confirmed the accuracy of Lopukhin’s allegations, Witte orderedthat the press and the remaining proclamations be destroyed. Apparently,Witte also wanted to press charges against Captain M. S. Kommisarov,the officer directly responsible for the printing and distribution of the in-flammatory material, but the tsar made it clear that he would not allowKommisarov to be punished because the officer had done valuable espi-onage during the war with Japan.

Nevertheless, it seems highly unlikely that the pogroms began in re-sponse to a signal from St. Petersburg or that they would not have takenplace at all without official inspiration or approval. Their randomnessand the failure of local officials to follow one clearly defined policy ar-gue against the proposition that the pogroms were planned in the capi-tal. Moreover, Witte himself, determined to maintain order and to en-list the support of liberals, not only put an end to Kommisarov’sactivities but publicly condemned the violence and vowed to take the“most decisive steps” to curb it. Two high officials who had brazenlyshown their sympathy for the pogroms, P. G. Kurlov, governor ofMinsk, and D. M. Neidhardt, the prefect of Odessa, were actually dis-missed and brought to trial (both were cleared by the Senate in March1906). It is also important to note that some higher officials in local areasdid not approve of the pogroms and, in fact, made it clear that they wouldnot tolerate the violence. These areas remained calm. One such officialwas the governor of Saratov, P. A. Stolypin, who ordered an immediatehalt to attacks on Jews that had begun in his province. It seems highly un-likely that he would have been promoted to head the government sixmonths later had he contravened directives from the government.

An explanation of the mass violence is not easy. Much of the recklessplundering and beatings of innocent civilians were the work of ruffiansmotivated by prejudice and by a craving for loot. But peasants, shop-keepers, coachmen, janitors, and even some workers (though apparently

not any who belonged to trade unions) lent a hand, for the same reasons.For these people, however, another factor may also have played a role.They found unbearable the sight of multitudes of ordinary Russians,among them many Jews and rowdy students, celebrating their victoryover the revered tsar, often by defiling his portrait. For nine months the“upstarts” had defied authority more or less with impunity; now theyhad apparently succeeded in bringing down the entire political system,and with it the hierarchical structure on which Russian society had beenbased, a structure in which the perpetrators of pogroms enjoyed a certainstatus they wished to preserve. As one observer noted, ordinary peoplewho had until October at least been able to take refuge in their superior-ity to Jews and other social outcasts “must undoubtedly have felt miser-able [in seeing] the streets captured by new people, precisely those peoplewho up to this time had stood outside the law, people against whomeverything had been permissible. There are [such] malcontents evenamong the more solid elements of the population.” And if the autocracycould no longer restrain the upstarts, those who yearned to maintain theold order because they felt secure within it would have to take the lawinto their own hands. To some vigilantes, such conduct may not evenhave seemed to be a violation of legal norms, for the tsar’s capitulationsignified to them that their revered leader—in their view the only legiti-mate source of authority—had been undermined by evil forces, and thatthey must therefore come to his rescue at all costs.

The prominence of Jews among the upstarts was especially galling tothe pogromshchiki. For religious, social, and economic reasons, hatred ofthe Jews was deeply rooted among many sectors of the Russian popula-tion. Until 1905, the Jewish minority had been denied most of the fewrights enjoyed by other subjects of the empire. Now, not only was theretalk of granting rights of citizenship to Jews, but also they had even as-sumed positions of responsibility in movements that had dealt the tsar acrushing blow. Many people, including foreign observers, were convincedthat “Jewish money had been a major mainspring” of the revolutionarymovement. The government was said to possess incontrovertible evidencethat Russian banks had disbursed huge amounts of money received fromabroad in small sums to members of the Social Democratic and SocialistRevolutionary parties.

In addition to mob violence in urban centers, Witte also was confrontedwith a new wave of disturbances in the countryside and a rash of mu-tinies in the army and navy.

The relative calm in the villages in the late summer and early fall of



1905 came to an end with the large-scale disorders that broke out inChernigov (Northern Ukraine) on October 23, when about two thousandpeasants plundered several landlords’ estates. The unrest spread quickly,reaching its climax in November (when there were 796 major and minorincidents), by which time the turbulence in the cities had already receded.It has been estimated that during the last months of 1905, three times asmany regions suffered major disturbances as in the spring and early sum-mer; altogether, 478 districts in the forty-seven provinces of EuropeanRussia were affected, as well as parts of Caucasia, the Baltic provinces,and Poland.

The basic pattern was similar to that of the earlier period of unrest:peasants cut down timber, refused to pay taxes, and took grain from es-tates; and agricultural workers staged strikes. Now, however, the peasantmovement assumed a more violent stance: in Tambov alone, 130 estateshad buildings burned down. It was also more common for peasants toseize land for “temporary use”—that is, until the State Duma, expectedto meet soon, approved the seizures. Although violence against individu-als increased, it still was not widespread, in part because landlords madetheir escape before the arrival of the marauding peasants. The unrest sub-sided late in 1905, only to resume with renewed vigor in the period fromMay to August 1906. By the time the revolution ended in 1907, the em-pire had endured the most intense wave of agrarian upheaval since thePugachev peasant rebellion of 1773–75. Total losses in European Russiaalone amounted to 29 million rubles.

A major reason for the new wave of agrarian disturbances was the de-terioration of economic conditions in the countryside. In two-thirds ofthe European provinces, the 1905 harvest was poorer than that of 1904.But the impact on the peasants of the overall political situation shouldnot be minimized. Although even this renewed peasant unrest can prob-ably not be attributed primarily to agitators from the cities—as govern-ment spokesmen were fond of insisting—the news that the tsar had ca-pitulated to the opposition and issued the October Manifesto did inflamethe peasants, who placed their own interpretation on the document. Forexample, the peasants in Tambov, whose conduct was particularly fero-cious, were convinced that “the Tsar had long ago ordered the landlordsto give the land to the peasants, but they delayed, and now the Tsar gavea secret order to the peasants to take the land themselves.” The land-lords’ abandonment of their estates before the unrest only confirmed thepeasants in their view of the ruler’s intentions.

In many villages, it took some time for peasants to receive detailed in-formation about the Manifesto, partly because of the poor system ofcommunications and partly because the clergy deliberately held back the

news. When rumors about the Manifesto reached the peasants anyway,they assumed that they had been kept in the dark by the reactionary bu-reaucrats and landlords, who did not want them to know that the tsarhad granted “freedom” to the people. Freedom, as interpreted by thepeasants, meant the right to attack landlords’ estates.

Many peasants had simply lost faith in the government, whichthroughout 1905 had paid little attention to them. Nor was the OctoberManifesto addressed to their immediate concerns. To be sure, in a mani-festo of November 3, the government reduced by one-half the redemp-tion dues for almost all peasants as of January 1, 1906, and promised to-tal elimination of such dues by January 1, 1907. The government alsoannounced that the Peasants’ Bank would soon provide more assistanceto those with small holdings who wished to buy land. But these modestconcessions did not meet the peasants’ expectations.

In official documents of the time, one theme was frequently sounded:that unrest in so many localities could not be stopped because the au-thorities did not have adequate military force at their disposal. A sizableportion of the army continued to be bogged down in the Far East, and“disquieting ferment” was noticeable among the lower ranks of variousmilitary units, making it hazardous to entrust even those troops that wereavailable with duty against troublesome villagers. Unable to send suffi-cient troops to the provinces with the greatest ferment, Witte sent aides-de-camp of the tsar instead, in the hope that the presence of these per-sonal emissaries of the highest authority would have a calming effect andwould also encourage local officials to take sterner measures to quell theunrest. It was a desperate gamble that did not pay off. The unrest sub-sided late in 1905, in part because of the punitive expeditions and in partbecause the villagers seem simply to have run out of steam.

In the meantime, Witte had to cope with extensive disaffection in thearmy and navy. Many soldiers and sailors also chose to interpret the Oc-tober Manifesto according to their own lights. They persuaded them-selves that the tsar’s concession gave them license to overturn the rulesand regulations that they found burdensome. Of course, the Manifesto it-self made no reference at all to civil liberties for men in uniform, but thatwas immaterial. The tsar had yielded to the opposition, authority in thecivilian sector had collapsed, and to men in the military it seemed asthough they, too, were no longer bound by the old restraints. They wereconvinced that they would not be punished for breaking the codes of mil-itary discipline. In short, the October Manifesto produced a profoundchange in the psychology of men who had been indoctrinated to acceptdiscipline as the prime virtue. With that psychological change, the dikeswere opened for a veritable flood of mutinies.



The first occurred in Kronstadt, the city whose great naval baseguarded the approaches to St. Petersburg at the head of the Gulf of Fin-land, on October 26–27, when three to four thousand soldiers and sailorsarmed with rifles staged a riot. They plundered businesses throughout thecity, destroying some 120 establishments and a few private houses; thedamage to property came to about 1 million rubles. The mutineers alsoattacked units that had not joined the riot. Revolutionaries tried to directthe rioters into what they considered to be disciplined political action,but their influence was negligible. Alarmed by the persistent rioting, thecommander of the fleet and ports of the Baltic Sea warned St. Petersburgthat Kronstadt was “in a dangerous situation” and asked for a “largeforce to pacify the city.”

The mutineers’ demands, most of which dealt with conditions in theservices, indicate clearly that recent political developments had had animpact on the soldiers and sailors, who based their first demand, thatthey be granted the rights of citizenship (including specifically the rightsof association and of free speech), on the Manifesto, which, they claimed,accorded such rights to all the people. But on the whole, broader politicalissues were of secondary importance to them. Most of the mutineers’ de-mands focused on such matters as reduction in their term of service, aminimum salary of six rubles a month, and better food and clothing.They also asked to be allowed to attend meetings, to spend their free timeas they chose, to buy alcoholic drinks without restrictions, “for . . . [we]are not children.” The authorities wasted no time in dispatching loyaltroops from St. Petersburg and Pskov, and by late October 27 they re-stored order, but only after much blood was shed (twenty-four killed andseventy-two wounded).

But this did not prevent the spread of disorder in the military. Themost dramatic and clearly politically motivated mutiny took place in Sev-astopol, a naval base in the Crimea, where a thirty-eight-year-old lieu-tenant, P. P. Schmidt, attracted a sizable following among disaffectedsailors and radical workers. As a student at the Petersburg Naval School,Schmidt had come under the influence of the radical doctrines of N. K.Mikhailovsky and N. V. Shelgunov, which apparently prompted him toabandon the military for the merchant marines. Mobilized when the warbroke out with Japan, he became a commander of a torpedo boat thatwas stationed at Sevastopol at the time of the general strike, an event thatdrove him to political action. He began to deliver fiery speeches de-nouncing the authorities at demonstrations and in the city council, andthis turned him into a local hero. By November, the cruisers Svirepy andOchakov as well as several smaller boats had fallen under the control ofmutineers, who called on Schmidt to assume command of the rebellion.

Doubtful about the likely success of such a venture, he hesitated but thenan old revolutionary, I. P. Voronitsyn, prevailed on him to accept thechallenge.

Schmidt now acted boldly. He proclaimed himself commander of thefleet, raised the red flag on all ships under his command, sent a telegramto the tsar demanding the immediate convocation of a constituent as-sembly, and formulated a grand plan to seize control of the entire fleet atSevastopol and to secure the isthmus leading to the Crimea against out-side forces. Schmidt also ordered the arrest of officers opposed to his re-bellion and threatened to hang them if the government tried to quell therising.

Admiral G. P. Chukhnin, commander of the fleet in Sevastopol, nowunleashed an attack on the ships supporting Schmidt, and after artilleryfire put the Ochakov out of commission the mutiny collapsed within amatter of hours. Chukhnin’s forces arrested sixteen hundred men to-gether with Schmidt and then freed twenty officers held by the rebels.Early in 1906, Schmidt and three of his accomplices were court-martialed. Schmidt’s eloquent defense, which included an elaborate at-tack on the tsarist regime, attracted a great deal of sympathetic attentionfrom the press but did not sway the tribunal, which sentenced all four de-fendants to death; on March 6, 1906, they were shot. Many liberals wereshocked, in part because Schmidt was the first officer to be executed indecades and in part because it was widely believed that he had merelywished to defend the principles of the October Manifesto but had beencarried away by the tensions of the moment into leading a mutiny.

All told, 211 separate mutinies were recorded in the Russian armyalone between late October and mid-December 1905, though relativelyfew were accompanied by serious violence. In most of them, the men sim-ply refused to obey orders, left their barracks, held meetings to discusscurrent affairs, and talked back to officers. The elite corps, the Cavalryand Cossacks, were virtually untouched by mutiny, but one-third of allinfantry units experienced some form of disturbance, and the navy wasso riddled with unrest that the government feared that it could no longerbe relied on to carry out its mission. Moreover, late in November therewere indications that quite a large group of officers (mainly in the FarEast and Siberia) were openly supporting the opposition.

On December 6, the government decided on a series of military re-forms. It increased pay and meat rations, provided servicemen for thefirst time with tea and sugar, and promised to abolish forced labor by sol-diers in the civilian economy. The government also reduced the term ofservice, from four to three years for infantrymen, five to four years forcavalrymen, and seven to five years for sailors. Finally, the government



removed a major source of discontent by speeding up the demobilizationof reservists.

These concessions helped to calm the soldiers and sailors, but proba-bly a more crucial factor in restoring discipline was the decision by thegovernment in mid-December to move forcefully against the civilianswho had been defying its authority. Once the government embarked onthat course, it became clear that the October Manifesto did not signifythe dissolution of the old order after all. The psychology of the soldiersand sailors now changed as suddenly and dramatically as it had in mid-October. With the restoration of authority in the civilian sector, the menin uniform, most of them unsympathetic to political radicalism, againsubmitted to the orders of their superiors. In thus desisting from theirown “revolution,” the soldiers and sailors removed a serious threat togovernmental stability.

Of course, the government was never totally bereft of loyal troops.Even among the infantry, the branch most deeply affected by mutinies,two-thirds of the units were not affected by such serious unrest as mu-tinies. The thirteen regiments of the Guard Corps, elite soldiers who re-ceived special privileges, remained almost completely immune to disor-der. Moreover, in late 1905 and early 1906, the government activatedsome one hundred thousand Cossacks, who were given generous grantsof money and whose privileges were confirmed by special charters issuedin the tsar’s name. Relatively small, well-armed detachments of such loyalsoldiers could be used with great effectiveness against poorly armedbands of workers and peasants. It was these loyal troops that the gov-ernment began to unleash in mid-December, a move that proved to be in-strumental in turning back the tide of revolution.

chapter four

The Days of Liberty and Armed Uprising

During the period immediately following the issuance of the OctoberManifesto Russia endured intense unrest and governmental impotence,but it also enjoyed a remarkable degree of freedom. Some foreign ob-servers were actually alarmed, because they feared that extremists wouldnow be able to increase their following among the masses. To the Ger-man ambassador in St. Petersburg, it almost seemed as though “the gov-ernment wants to facilitate the work of revolutionaries.”

During these Days of Liberty, as the ten weeks from October 18 untilearly December came to be known, antigovernment publications “in-creased like mushrooms.” Newspapers and journals of all political move-ments—liberal, Marxist, Socialist Revolutionary, Anarchist—were soldfreely on the streets of St. Petersburg and elsewhere, and the attacks onthe authorities in these publications were often merciless. One of themore famous cartoons in a popular journal depicted the tsar on thethrone whose legs were being chewed up by mice. Some of the caricatureswere beyond the comprehension of the minister of internal affairs,Durnovo, who relied on A. V. Gerasimov, chief of the St. PetersburgOkhrana, for enlightenment: “This is Count Witte and here (representedas a pig or toad) is you, Your Excellency.” Durnovo asked what could bedone to “restore order.” “If I were permitted to close down all revolu-tionary presses and to arrest 700 to 800 people,” Gerasimov replied,“then I guarantee that I could bring calm to St. Petersburg.” Durnovo,however, refused to authorize such harsh measures on the ground that thenew constitutional order forbade it.

Although on occasion the police closed down some papers, these wereusually temporary inconveniences to the public, since the publicationssoon reappeared without being bothered. On November 24, the govern-ment, yielding to reality, formally abolished preliminary censorship of pe-riodicals. Some important, though vaguely defined, restrictions on freedomof the press remained, but no publication was to be suppressed without

Days of Liberty and Armed Uprising 91

juridical proceedings. The government also announced that the StateDuma would be charged with adopting comprehensive legislation onfreedom of the press.

Attendance at public meetings became even more common than it hadbeen after the granting of autonomy to institutions of higher learning inlate August. At the same time, the number of labor unions increased dra-matically throughout the country. Political parties of all persuasionsstepped up their organizational activities and increased their membershipnumbers. Even the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks came out into the openand succeeded in substantially raising their membership, though they didnot abandon clandestine operations completely.

But politically the most dramatic development during the Days of Lib-erty was the vast expansion of operations by the soviets. They establishedregular contact with city councils and often secured access to public hallsfor their meetings; in some regions, local organs of government even hon-ored the soviet’s request that they give financial aid to unemployed work-ers. The pacesetter was the St. Petersburg Soviet, which did not hesitateto send directives to government agencies such as the postal service andthe railroads; on several occasions, it entered into negotiations with theSt. Petersburg City Council—and once even with the prime minister him-self. It sent numerous inquiries to government offices, and the latter weresufficiently impressed by the soviet’s authority to go to the trouble of an-swering. The soviet also sponsored collections for unemployed workersand distributed 30 kopeks a day to needy adults and 10 to 15 kopeks tochildren. Moreover, it set up several inexpensive dining halls for the un-employed and their families.

The boldest undertaking of the St. Petersburg Soviet was the establish-ment of its own militia, whose members, identified by special armbands,“interfered in the affairs of the police, gave . . . [them] orders and madedemands of them.” It was not uncommon for “confused [police] officers”to give in to the requests of militiamen. On one occasion, a militiaman de-manded that a policeman clean out a pit in a garbage-strewn yard becausethe odor was unbearable. The policeman meekly carried out the order.

By mid-November, the soviet’s militia numbered about six thousandmen, who had at their disposal revolvers, hunting guns, knives, and heavyspades. In addition, about three hundred workers belonged to a specialmilitia of “self-defense,” small groups of which patrolled the streets everynight from 8 pm to 6 am to protect merchants and residents. Some armedmilitiamen were posted outside the soviet’s meeting place, the Free Eco-nomic Society, where deputies gathered almost daily to discuss politicaldevelopments and to adopt resolutions on current issues. The soviet tookit upon itself to demand that the government issue a general amnesty forall categories of political prisoners, send the army out of the city, end the

state of siege everywhere in the empire, and hold a democratic electionfor a constituent assembly. It also sent delegates to other cities and re-gions of the country to establish contact with local soviets and variousworkers’ organizations, and it maintained close relations with the All-Russian Peasants’ Union.

Many workers in the capital considered the soviet to be their legiti-mate representative and saw it as a vehicle for the attainment of furthersocial and political concessions from the government. Even some mem-bers of the middle classes turned to it for help on specific issues. Not sur-prisingly, the growing power of the soviet aroused fear in non-working-class groups, especially among conservatives. The newspaper Novoevremia complained that there were really two governments, one led byCount Witte and one by Krustalev-Nosar (chairman of the St. PetersburgSoviet), and no one knew who would arrest whom first.

Flush with success, the St. Petersburg Soviet succumbed to hubris andoverplayed its hand. Instead of consolidating its achievements, whichwere already impressive, it became increasingly militant, even reckless.When workers in several large enterprises in the capital decided on theirown initiative to introduce the eight-hour workday, the soviet supportedthem despite the warnings of some supporters that this would be a majorpolitical blunder. “We are not yet done with absolutism,” said V. M.Chernov, leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, “and you want totake on the bourgeoisie.” Most deputies in the soviet, however, either outof conviction or fear that the workers would proceed on their own, votedfor the following resolution: “On October 31, the eight-hour day is to beintroduced by revolutionary means in all factories.” Both wings of theSocial Democratic movement supported the decision.

The government and many employers responded with a massive lock-out, and early in November more than one hundred thousand workerswere affected. The lockout was an unprecedented instance of collabora-tion by the employers, the result of their conviction that defense of theirinterests now required a unified stand. Within short order, the Associa-tion of Manufacturers and Factory Owners, representing 150 companiesthat together employed more than one hundred thousand people, wasformed. The association decided not to pay workers for days lost duringstrikes and to close down their plants if workers tried to introduce theeight-hour workday on their own. The employers’ tactics had a moderat-ing effect on workers, many of whom were in desperate economic straitsbecause of the numerous strikes in preceding months.

In the meantime, relations between the soviet and the government be-gan to turn sour as a result of a feud over the court-martial of severalhundred soldiers and sailors who had mutinied in Kronstadt and over the

92 Days of Liberty and Armed Uprising


government’s decision to impose martial law on Poland, then racked bydisorder. In the hope of reviving the solidarity of antigovernment forces,the soviet decided to shift its agitation from economic to political issues,and on November 1, it voted in favor of a general political strike to protestthe government’s actions. Few workers outside the capital heeded the callto leave their jobs. In the capital itself, some one hundred thousand peopleare said to have participated in the strike, but within a few days, even theybegan drifting back to their jobs. Moreover, large sectors of the liberal in-telligentsia refused to support the new strike, which they considered un-warranted. In their view, the opposition should now devote its energies topreparing for the elections to the State Duma. By November 4, a majorityof the Executive Committee of the soviet realized that the strike was a fail-ure and voted, nine to six, to end it as of November 7. This was the soviet’sfirst major defeat.

At about the same time, it became clear that the campaign for theeight-hour workday had also backfired. For one thing, it drew employerscloser to the government, which supported resistance to the workers’ de-mands by enforcing a lockout at its own plants and by making troopsavailable to protect privately owned factories. Moreover, the campaignprompted even so militant a liberal as Paul Miliukov to reconsider theadvisability of basing his political strategy on an alliance with revolu-tionaries. On November 12, the soviet announced a temporary halt to thecampaign, an acknowledgment that it had misjudged the public mood.

In yet another strike, this one by white-collar employees of the postalservice, who had called for a nationwide stoppage in mid-November toprotest the government’s dismissal of three of their leaders, the left suf-fered a further defeat. A fair number of employees refused to heed the callfor a strike, and the government was able to maintain communicationsby assigning firemen and others to fill in for the absentees. By late No-vember that strike, too, fizzled out. This defeat of the postal strikemarked a turning point in the Days of Liberty. Until then, the governmenthad mostly taken a defensive stand in the face of work stoppages and un-rest. But it could not tolerate ruptured communications between St. Pe-tersburg and the rest of the empire. Once the government’s measures tobreak the postal workers’ strike had succeeded, the authorities went on ageneral offensive against the opposition.

In a ukase of November 29, Tsar Nicholas decreed that in the event ofa breakdown of telegraphic services or railway communications in anyregion of the country, provincial officials would be authorized to placesuch areas under Reinforced Security or Extraordinary Security. Previ-ously, the first measure could be enacted only with the approval of theminister of internal affairs, and the second with the approval of the tsar.

On December 12, Nicholas issued another ukase in which he specified thepunishments, all very severe, of strikers at enterprises of “public or stateimportance” where a work stoppage could produce “ruinous conse-quences for the population.”

agitation for armed struggle

The strike movement in November was only one aspect of the growingmilitancy by radical activists. Increasingly, the soviets and publications ofvarious socialist parties advocated another general political strike or,more ominously, an armed struggle against the tsarist regime. And sev-eral Menshevik leaders as well as many lower-ranking Menshevik ac-tivists threw caution to the wind and abandoned the Marxist dogma thata bourgeois revolution must precede a socialist seizure of power. In fact,the rhetoric and political conduct of a sizable number of Mensheviks wasnow hardly distinguishable from that of the more militant Bolsheviks. InOctober and November 1905, the two factions actually formed federalcouncils in various towns, which generally consisted of an equal numberof Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

In Nachalo, a Menshevik paper that appeared legally in Russia, LeonTrotsky advocated the theory of permanent revolution—first advanced inthat paper by his colleague and “mentor,” Parvus (A. L. Helfand)—inwhich he explicitly abandoned the traditional Marxist notion that back-ward Russia must undergo a more or less prolonged period of bourgeoisdomination before the socialist revolution could be staged. The Russianproletariat, according to Trotsky, had demonstrated greater energy anddetermination than its counterpart in Western Europe and would there-fore be the pathfinder in the struggle for socialism. “There is no stage,”he wrote, “in the bourgeois revolution at which this force [the Russianproletariat] could become satiated, for it is driven forward by the ironlogic of class interest. The law of self-preservation dictates to the prole-tariat a program of permanent revolution. The proletariat accomplishesthe fundamental tasks of democracy and then, at a certain moment, thelogic of its struggle to consolidate its power confronts it with problemsthat are purely socialist. Revolutionary permanency is established be-tween our minimum and maximum programs.”

Although some Bolsheviks shared Trotsky’s optimism about the immi-nence of a socialist revolution, their leader, Lenin, who arrived in Russianon November 8, was more restrained. He hailed the October Manifesto asa “great victory for the revolution,” but he also warned that the tsar had



by no means capitulated and that an armed insurrection and the forma-tion of a provisional revolutionary government were necessary to eradi-cate the old order. However, the revolutionary forces were not yet strongenough to crush tsarism. The proletariat, Lenin contended, must estab-lish an alliance with the peasantry to stage a successful revolution, but heleft unanswered the question of how long a provisional government, rep-resenting both the workers and peasants, would then remain in power.He insisted that such a government would introduce democratic reformsas well as arrange for the election of a constituent assembly. But would itgive up power at that point, paving the way for the proletariat to preparefor the next revolution, the socialist revolution? The thrust of many state-ments by Lenin in 1905 seemed to be that this was the most likely option.Yet the notion that the masses would shed their blood in a revolutionagainst the autocracy and then voluntarily make way for other classes totake power is one of the less convincing tenets of Russian Marxism.

Be that as it may, late in October 1905 the Moscow Committee of So-cial Democrats adopted a resolution calling for the “immediate prepara-tion for a new decisive battle.” The Socialist Revolutionaries, the largestradical party, found the views and tactics of the most militant Marxistscongenial. Indeed, the SRs had actually been the first to expound a the-ory of permanent revolution, and since the beginning of 1905 had fa-vored an armed assault on the autocracy. Thus, despite lingering differ-ences between various sectors of the revolutionary left, they found itpossible to cooperate in the campaign against the old order. The mount-ing reports in November and December from various parts of the em-pire—Chita in southeastern Siberia, Novorossiisk, Irkutsk, Krasnoiarsk,the Baltic provinces—that soviets or other oppositional groups were as-suming the authority of local organs of government further emboldenedthe militants.

The deepening conflict between the government and the revolutionaryleft placed the liberals in a precarious position. A growing number ofthem became alarmed at the prospect of an armed uprising, yet theycould not bring themselves to rally behind the government. They fearedthat support of Witte might encourage the government to turn back theclock, but they were equally afraid that if they supported the radicalsthey might provoke more repression. A congress of Zemstvo and CityCouncil Representatives decided early in November, after much wran-gling, to appeal to the prime minister to revoke the emergency decreesand to grant autonomy to the Polish kingdom, in return for which the lib-erals promised to support the government. Witte promised to study theoffer, and on November 29 he announced that although the governmentremained committed to the Manifesto, it would not accede to the liberals’

wishes because the widespread “disturbances and revolutionary activitiesdirected against . . . authority in general” were undermining the state,which could therefore not abandon exceptional decrees and states ofemergency. The liberal newspaper Russkie vedomosti interpreted Witte’sresponse as evidence that the government was determined to follow “itsformer policies.” Several actions by the government late in November lentcredence to that somber assessment.

At noon on November 26, infantrymen and Cossacks surrounded theheadquarters of the Free Economic Society and arrested the president ofthe soviet, G. S. Khrustalev-Nosar, together with several deputies. The so-viet immediately elected a new presidium of three men, among themTrotsky. The presidium wasted no time in launching a counterattack. OnNovember 27, it passed a resolution calling on its followers to preparefor an uprising. In addition, the presidium decided to strike at the gov-ernment’s soft underbelly, the precarious financial system. The countrywas on the verge of financial collapse, partly as a result of the enormousexpense of the war and partly because the rich, panicky over the contin-uing internal turmoil, were sending substantial amounts of capitalabroad. During the second week in November, delegates at a meeting ofthe All-Russian Peasants’ Union had for the first time discussed possiblemeasures that might be taken by the population at large to undermine thestate’s financial system. Parvus was familiar with the discussions and nowbecame one of the moving spirits behind the drafting of the FinancialManifesto, which was published on December 2 in eight newspapers inSt. Petersburg.

Signed by the soviet, the All-Russian Peasants’ Union, the RSDWP, theSocialist Revolutionary Party, and the Polish Socialist Party, the manifestosought to “cut the government off from the last resource of its existence:financial revenue.” It called on the people not to make any further re-demption payments or other payments to the Treasury and to demand allwages in “gold, and in the case of sums less than five rubles, full-weightcoin.” The manifesto also urged the populace to withdraw all depositsfrom banks and to accept only gold. The authors of the manifesto as-sumed that the government, deprived of an adequate supply of gold,would lose its credit rating and would therefore not be able to secure vi-tally needed loans.

It was an original and imaginative ploy, but it was not likely that the Fi-nancial Manifesto could achieve its purpose. First, many people had al-ready begun withdrawing funds from their accounts even before the eventsof late November. Moreover, the police prevented wide distribution of themanifesto by confiscating copies of the eight newspapers immediately af-ter their appearance. The police also made clear their determination to



punish anyone who advocated the tactics set forth in the manifesto. Theyarrested the chief editors of the eight newspapers, who remained in cus-tody pending the payment of bail in the amount of ten thousand rubles.Then, on December 3, the soviet’s Executive Committee and two hun-dred deputies were also taken into custody.

It is still not clear why Witte took these measures. He knew that thepolice action would trigger an all-out war between the government andthe revolutionary left, which he had wanted to avoid. It may be that latein 1905 he was in such a state of acute anxiety that he acted on instinct.There are reports that at times he blindly lashed out at longtime collabo-rators and even at his few loyal friends. On December 14, he toldKokovtsov, the minister of finance, “I wish you knew in what a blind al-ley I find myself. There are moments when I am ready to commit sui-cide.” At an important official meeting nine days earlier, he publicly con-fessed that the “whole revolution” had been a “nightmare for him.” Hispolitical failures since the October strike had brought him to a breakingpoint.

Although severely weakened by the arrests, the revolutionary move-ment was not completely crushed. The deputies of the soviet who escapedarrest formed a second soviet and elected a new Executive Committee,headed by Parvus, that called for a general political strike to begin on De-cember 8. “Citizens,” the committee declared in a ringing appeal, “free-dom or slavery. A Russia ruled by the people or a Russia plundered by agang of robbers, that is the question. . . . It is better to die in the strugglethan to live in slavery.” The workers did not respond in very large num-bers. Although the Union of Unions endorsed the strike, relatively fewmembers of the intelligentsia did so. Neither the banks nor the zemstvoand municipal institutions stopped functioning. On December 19, the Ex-ecutive Committee called off the strike. In the meantime, the center ofgravity of the revolution had shifted from St. Petersburg to Moscow,where the final drama of the first and most turbulent phase of the revo-lution reached its climax.

uprising in moscow

At first glance, Moscow was an unlikely site for such a test of strength,for it had lagged behind St. Petersburg in revolutionary fervor. For ex-ample, the reaction to Bloody Sunday was not nearly as intense there asin the capital. About three and half times as many people went on strikein St. Petersburg as in Moscow, whose population of 1.1 million was only

340,000 less than that of the capital. To be sure, the general strike of Oc-tober began on the Moscow railway lines, but no soviet was formed in thecity until November 21, some five weeks after the appearance of the St.Petersburg Soviet. This is not to suggest that Moscow in 1905 was free ofturmoil. The universities and high schools were centers of unrest. Workersmade a fair amount of progress in organizing unions, and both liberalsand peasants held numerous illegal meetings to express their discontent.Nor was Moscow spared a breakdown in civil order. An English journal-ist reported that during the Days of Liberty violent crimes occurred withsuch frequency that when he walked in the streets after dark passers-bywould skirt “around me in a kind of arc, and if they came upon me theysuddenly ran. . . . All were living in that haggard element of fear.”

Still, political radicalism did not emerge as a powerful force inMoscow until the late summer and early fall, and then within a fewweeks the city surpassed St. Petersburg as the focal point of the revolu-tion as well as the center of the bloodiest strife of the upheaval. The rea-sons for this shift are probably to be found in the differences in the econ-omy and in the composition of the working class and the oppositionalmovement in the two cities.

Heavy, large-scale industry was much more prevalent in St. Petersburgthan in Moscow. As a result, steelworkers far outnumbered textile work-ers in the capital, whereas in Moscow the opposite was the case. Rela-tively well paid, and more likely to be literate and settled urban dwellers,steelworkers were especially inclined toward direct action against theiremployers rather than against the political authorities. In 1905, theyplayed a prominent role in initiating strikes and in persuading workers inother industries to join them.

Also, a significantly higher percentage of the plants in St. Petersburgthan in Moscow employed at least five hundred workers. Workers insuch plants were more easily organized and tended to be more disci-plined. By contrast, the workers in the clothing, textile, and food indus-tries, the dominant sectors in Moscow’s industrial economy, were, asone historian noted, “unhappy and volatile, but culturally and politi-cally unsophisticated.”

Much more so in Moscow than in St. Petersburg, the labor movementreceived its “organizational guidance” from the white-collar workers inthe nonmanufacturing sector of the economy. These workers were in-strumental in organizing employees at the railroads and municipal insti-tutions, without whose support the radical left in Moscow would haveremained relatively insignificant. The differences in the development ofthe labor movement in the two cities were reflected in the leadership ofthe general strike in October. Laura Engelstein has pointed out that in



Moscow a “mixed committee of liberal professionals, white-collar em-ployees, and representatives of industrial and craft trades” directed thestrike, whereas in the St. Petersburg Soviet, workers from metal and ma-chine factories predominated. The alliance in Moscow between “bour-geois” elements of the working population and the industrial workersheld fast during the armed uprising in December. Two groups thus appearto have served as the cannon fodder of the insurrectionary movement:white-collar workers, who because of their greater exposure to radicalideas were more easily captivated by the slogans of extremists than skilledworkers, and unsophisticated laborers, who felt that they had little to lose.

When the general strike in October 1905 ended, some radical activistsconcluded that work stoppages were a spent bullet and therefore beganto talk of preparing for the next phase, an armed struggle. As early asmid-November of 1905, the German consul in Moscow, a close observerof the political scene, wrote to the Foreign Office in Berlin that there wasthe likelihood of “serious disturbances with an anticapitalist thrust” inthe near future. Moscow appeared to be tranquil, but “a simple glance atthe newspapers here suggests that beneath the apparent calm of the citythere is concealed a feverish movement that is gradually affecting evermore strata of the population. . . . Every week, new publications appearthat openly preach violent revolution, and every day one can read aboutthe emergence of new groups of employees or workers, who for the mostpart immediately join socialist organizations.” Moreover, workers werestaging an increasing number of strikes over “purely political” issues.Frequently, strikers made threats or used force against their employers aswell as against workers who crossed the picket line. The authorities’ fail-ure to halt the violence, according to the German consul, only encour-aged lawlessness.

Many ordinary Russians also sensed that some sort of cataclysm wasimminent. The U.S. ambassador to St. Petersburg learned on a brief visitto Berlin that “Russians with their families are moving to Germany ingreat numbers: 2,500 refugees in Königsberg alone, Berlin also crowded.”The ambassador also learned that the Russian government had mobilizeda large number of Cossacks, “who can be absolutely depended upon,”and he believed that the tsar would try to “reconquer the country.”

In light of these developments and the theoretical pronouncements ofthe revolutionary left, the question often raised by contemporaries andhistorians of who provoked the violent clash, the government or the revo-lutionaries, seems pointless. As V. M. Zenzinov, a prominent Socialist Rev-olutionary, put it many years later, “The revolution and the governmentwere like two persons who had already taken aim at each other with pis-tols. The only question was, who would be the first to pull the trigger.”

The Moscow Committee, the main organization of the Bolsheviks in thecity, was the driving force behind the uprising. About fifteen people nomi-nally belonged to the committee, but the principal decisions were made bythree intellectuals, M. N. Liadov, M. I. Vasilev-Iuzhin, and V. L. Shantser(Marat). The immediate background to the determination of these men toengage the government in armed conflict is still somewhat hazy. The leftwas certainly perturbed by the police crackdown. Not only had the St. Pe-tersburg Soviet been wiped out, but in addition, on November 28 the po-lice rounded up the leaders of the Union of Ticket Collectors of theMoscow-Brest-Litovsk Railway, and two days later they invaded the Mu-seum for Assistance to Labor, an important meeting place for workers, andconfiscated publications as well as money. Enraged activists on the leftwanted to retaliate, but, as it turned out, they were inadequately prepared,both politically and organizationally, for an armed uprising.

Most significantly, there was no assurance that if the proletariat ofMoscow took the initiative that either workers elsewhere or the peasantswould follow suit. On December 4, a messenger from the St. PetersburgSoviet appeared before the soviet in Moscow to report on the workers’mood in the capital. Remarkably, there are three divergent accounts, allby Bolsheviks, of how the messenger assessed the chances of a strike bythe Petersburg workers. People seemed to hear whatever they wanted.

At local gatherings in Moscow where tactics were discussed, a few ac-tivists voiced serious reservations about launching an attack. The princi-pal fear was that peasants would not join the uprising, and it was gener-ally assumed that without them the insurrection would not succeed. Mostof the revolutionary leaders in Moscow, however, would not listen to thewarnings because they were intoxicated with their own rhetoric, whichhad stressed the need for violent revolution. As one of them put it, thepeasants might be quiescent, “but we have no choice,” and, in any case,“the thunder of the present struggle will perhaps awaken them.” He re-alized, as did several colleagues, that they faced a real possibility of death,but they were prepared to “make this sacrifice, convinced that it was nec-essary for the final triumph of our cause.”

Military preparations were as unimpressive as political ones. Al-though revolutionaries had been collecting weapons for about a year,their supplies hardly sufficed for a prolonged battle with the army. Earlyin December, no more than one thousand militiamen were armed andonly a few had been exposed to more than the most rudimentary militarytraining. Moreover, their leaders had not developed any tactics appropri-ate for street fighting.

In the last analysis, the revolutionaries knew that the outcome of an in-surrection would hinge on the conduct of the army. And on December 2



they were greatly encouraged by reports of a mutiny in Moscow. Betweentwo and three hundred soldiers of the Rostov Grenadier Regiment hadheld an unauthorized meeting and had elected a committee to lead whatamounted to a mutiny. They prepared a list of thirty-seven demands,most of which dealt with conditions in the army, and a day later therewere reports that three other units of the Rostov Grenadiers were aboutto join the mutiny. The authorities immediately acted to stem the unrest,ordering the arrest of a few officers and calling for the dispatch toMoscow of two regiments of infantry guards and one brigade of artillery.

The leaders of the revolutionary parties were jubilant, but it soonturned out that the men in the Rostov regiment were not interested injoining civilians in an attack on the government. Moreover, on December4, loyal soldiers arrested fifty-seven leaders of the military revolt, whichquickly fizzled out. But clutching at straws, the revolutionaries refused toaccept the possibility that the soldiers’ insubordination could be tracedprimarily to a desire for better conditions for themselves. On the con-trary, on December 5 A. N. Vasilev, the Bolsheviks’ military expert, tolda meeting of four hundred comrades that the revolutionaries could dis-pose of roughly one thousand armed men and that not more than fourthousand of the fourteen thousand troops presumed to be in the citywould follow orders to crush a workers’ uprising. At this meeting as wellas at several others, activists of diverse political persuasion voted for anuprising. On December 6, the Moscow Soviet, attended by about 120deputies, issued an official appeal to all workers to begin a “general po-litical strike” at noon the following day. “With our joint efforts we willfinally overthrow the criminal tsarist government, convoke a constituentassembly on the basis of universal, equal, direct, and secret suffrage, andproclaim a democratic republic, which alone can safeguard our freedomand the inviolability of our persons.”

For several days it actually seemed as though the advocates of anarmed uprising had accurately gauged the government’s fragility inMoscow. Local authorities failed to move forcefully against the insurrec-tion and thus gave the impression of being helpless. It seemed that Admi-ral F. V. Dubasov, the recently appointed governor-general of Moscow,was not up to handling the growing unrest.

The admiral had under his command about six thousand soldiers, twothousand policemen, and a division of gendarmes, a force large enoughto quell an insurrection quickly in open battle. But apparently out of fearthat his men might not be reliable, Dubasov withdrew them from thestreets, which provided the rebels with an opportunity to roam largeparts of the city at will. Had they been better organized and had theirleaders planned their moves ahead of time, the radicals most probably

could have seized the centers of government authority. At this early stage,Dubasov did take some measures to contain the uprising: he placedMoscow under a state of Extraordinary Security, and he arrested two im-portant Bolshevik leaders, Vasilev and Shantser (as well as the heads ofthe Menshevik printers’ union), a severe blow to the insurrection. Otherthan that, the governor-general confined himself to repeated and urgentpleas for reinforcements from St. Petersburg. The men at court were re-luctant to accede to Dubasov’s wishes because they feared that removingtroops from St. Petersburg would make the capital vulnerable to insur-rection. Only at Witte’s insistence that no such danger existed and hiswarning that the fall of Moscow “would be such a blow to the govern-ment of His Majesty that it could have incalculably harmful conse-quences” did the tsar order the reinforcement of the garrison in Moscow.However, the new forces did not arrive until December 15.

In the meantime, the economy of Moscow ground to a virtual stand-still. By the second day of the strike, more than eighty thousand workershad left their jobs, which made this the largest work stoppage by far in thecity’s history. Shopkeepers also closed their doors, either voluntarily or un-der pressure. On December 7, parties of deputies from the Moscow Soviettraversed the city, street by street, asking proprietors, “very politely” butwith threats of violence, to lock up their stores. By the evening of Decem-ber 7, public transportation had stopped, and there was no electricity.

A majority of public institutions, including the city government andthe provincial and district zemstvo boards, were also closed. “The moodis especially anxious,” a weekly journal reported, “bordering on panic, toa degree not observed in previous strikes. . . . All over the city agitatedpeople are running about, fussing, buying food, kerosene, candles.” OnDecember 8, private banks, theaters, schools, and most shops wereclosed. “Life in the city seemed to be extinct.”

During the first two days of the strike only scattered violence brokeout. Then, on December 9, the first major clash occurred at the FiedlerAcademy, where some five hundred people and one hundred armed mili-tiamen were attending a meeting of the railway union. At 10 pm troopssurrounded the building and ordered those present to surrender and giveup their weapons. The officer in charge promised that if the militiamenobeyed within two hours, they would be freed after being disarmed, butno one believed him.

At the expiration of the grace period, the infantrymen opened fire andadvanced to storm the academy; for the first time, they made use of lightartillery, causing a considerable amount of damage and quite a few casu-alties. After initially refusing to give up, the militiamen decided to yieldto the superior forces, but the soldiers showed no interest in ending the



confrontation peacefully. They killed at least five revolutionaries,wounded sixteen, and arrested one hundred and twenty as they emergedfrom the academy.

The use of artillery, highly unusual in a domestic disturbance, arousedprofound anger even among people unsympathetic to the insurgents andmarked the beginning of the bloody phase of the crisis. In many parts ofthe city, Muscovites now came to the aid of the militia by erecting barri-cades, which consisted of whatever was found at hand: telegraph poles,placards, stones, garden fences, doors ripped from private homes, lamp-posts, and odd pieces of wood. Tensions mounted further on the eveningof December 10, when a group of Socialist Revolutionaries threw twobombs at the headquarters of the Moscow Security Police, which slightlydamaged the building. At a meeting that same evening, Dubasov decidedto apply the “most severe measures to put down the uprising.”

The partisan tactics of the insurgents, which consisted of guerilla war-fare, baffled and confused the authorities as well as soldiers, who werebeing disarmed and manhandled by people not easily recognizable as in-surgents. Not wishing to take any chances, soldiers became trigger-happy,placing innocent civilians at risk. The series of unconnected brushes be-tween rebels and the army, many of them on the outskirts of town, weretroublesome but so long as the rebels did not launch a concerted attackon government troops they could not gain the upper hand.

In the political arena, the revolutionary left was more adroit and moresuccessful. The soviets—both the all-city soviet and the local ones in thedistricts—exercised a remarkable degree of authority over the civilianpopulation, issuing orders on which shops might open and at whathours, and they also laid down rules on prices of goods as well as on thegranting of credit to impecunious strikers. The Executive Committee ofthe soviet even attended to affairs that in themselves would appear tohave been trivial but evidently carried symbolic significance. For exam-ple, bakers were prohibited from producing “white bread, since the pro-letariat needs only black bread.” On December 10 no white bread couldbe found in Moscow.

In the Presnia District, the center of the textile industry and of an es-pecially militant sector of the working class, the local soviet assumed fullpowers of government and kept the insurrection going longer than any-where else. Policemen in the district were so intimidated by the militia-men that they donned civilian clothes (on orders of their superiors) toavoid being recognized. The District Combat Committee, which com-manded all the militiamen in the area (estimated at between two hundredand six hundred), had perforce to act on its own because contact with theother districts was cut off after December 11. In any case, because of the

arrest of two of the three leaders and poor overall planning and organi-zation, there was little centralized direction of the rising.

In the meantime, Dubasov began to use artillery fire against the Pres-nia insurgents with deadly effect. As soon as rebels fired one shot from abuilding, artillerymen trained their guns on the building and blasted it. Inkeeping with orders issued by the governor-general on December 12,troops fired their rifles on any group of more than three people who gath-ered in the streets. Casualties among the insurrectionists began to mountalarmingly, but their leaders continued to exude confidence and to makeunrealistic predictions about the spread of the revolution in other partsof the empire.

On December 15 the tide began to turn decisively against the insur-gents. The long-awaited help from St. Petersburg arrived in the form ofthe Semenovskii Regiment, commanded by Colonel G. A. Min, a soldiermade to order for Tsar Nicholas. Min had no scruples about shelling rev-olutionaries. By the time he arrived, Presnia was the primary center of re-sistance; the unrest in much of the rest of Moscow had subsided.

Late in the day on December 15, Min’s troops (about fifteen hun-dred), supported by sixteen artillery pieces, surrounded a large area ofthe Presnia District that included the Prokhorov cotton mill and theSchmidt furniture factory, two major centers of the insurrection. (Theowners of the two enterprises sympathized with the radicals and sup-plied them with shelter and food.) On the morning of December 16,Min sent Schmidt an ultimatum: the militiamen must surrender in fif-teen minutes or his factory would be destroyed. When the militiamenfailed to give up, the artillery continued to pound the factories for morethan two days, causing an enormous amount of damage and many ca-sualties. Resistance was light, for the insurgents quickly realized that afull-scale battle would be futile. Moreover, they had been ordered by thelocal soviet to disperse into the central parts of the city, and most man-aged to escape.

On December 15, even before the bombardment of Presnia, theMoscow Soviet had met to consider ending what was clearly a hopelessstruggle. After considerable debate the soviet voted on December 16 tocall on their followers to stop fighting in three days. The resolution of theExecutive Committee exuded defiance: “Our duty was to show that theworking class guards its own political interests, that it can stand up foritself with weapons in its hands, if necessary. We have fulfilled our duty.”Now the task would be to “prepare more actively for an all-Russian po-litical strike and a national armed uprising.”

The December uprising was a costly affair. According to the MedicalUnion, 1,059 Muscovites, most of them civilians not involved in thefighting, were killed. Of these, 137 were women and 86 were children.



Twenty-five policemen and nine soldiers lost their lives. But this was onlythe beginning of the carnage in Moscow, for the authorities unleashed abrutal crackdown. There were numerous executions, without any judicialproceedings, of workers and students on the mere suspicion of their hav-ing taken part in the rising. Hundreds of others were arrested, and manyof them were brutally beaten by their captors. Even people who had op-posed the excesses of the revolutionaries were appalled.

Military as well as political miscalculations by the militants go far toaccount for the failure of the Moscow uprising. The revolutionaries, de-spite their talk of the inevitability of military action, had formed only asmall militia, and it was inadequately armed and poorly trained. Perhapseven more significant, the revolutionaries’ political assumptions provedto be utterly wrong. They had counted on a mass rising of workersthroughout the country, but the events in St. Petersburg in November haddemonstrated that the workers were becoming increasingly isolated po-litically and that their revolutionary zeal was waning. They had sufferedone defeat after another during the strikes, and the arrest of the soviethad deprived them of leadership. Exhausted, demoralized, leaderless, theworkers in the capital could not realistically be expected to make the ul-timate effort, a military attack on the government. Elsewhere in the em-pire, workers staged disturbances in some two dozen cities, but noneposed a serious threat to local authorities.

Ironically, the spread of unrest after the outbreak of the Moscow in-surrection was impeded by an action that the workers themselves hadtaken. Because many of the postal and telegraph employees were onstrike early in December, communication between cities was extremelydifficult. On December 7, a telegram that reached Rostov-on-Don an-nouncing that the soviets in Moscow and St. Petersburg had called for ageneral political strike caused great excitement. But how could the localrevolutionaries be sure that the news was accurate? The infeasibility ofspeedy consultation among leaders in various localities prevented the rad-icals from developing a common strategy. By the same token, the inabil-ity of revolutionaries in Moscow to obtain a reliable and steady flow ofinformation from provincial towns helps to explain their unrealistic ap-praisals of their own situation.

repression

The impact of the Moscow uprising on the course of the revolution canhardly be exaggerated. It sharpened divisions within the opposition andstiffened the government’s resolve to crush the left. The liberal move-

ment, which until October had played a decisive role in undermining theautocracy, became politically more cautious and increasingly distanced it-self from the radical left. A case in point is the Moscow City Council,which met several times during the fighting. A motion on December 13that placed responsibility for the uprising on the government and urgedthe immediate convocation of a constituent assembly elected by universalsuffrage was defeated by a vote of forty-two to sixteen. Instead, the coun-cil adopted a much more moderate resolution that amounted to a mutedexpression of support for Witte’s overall program. From now on, the lib-erals, who until the uprising had enjoyed a majority in the city council,could count on no more than twenty to twenty-five votes out of a total ofone hundred.

Most prominent liberals and moderates expressed some degree of crit-icism of the uprising. The Octobrist N. I. Guchkov (brother of A. I.Guchkov) went so far as to offer a toast of gratitude to Governor-GeneralDubasov for having crushed the rebellion. Some Kadets, who stood to theleft of the Octobrists, now abandoned the tactic of solidarity with theradical leftists on the ground that the latter had demonstrated that theywere interested not in national liberation but in social as well as politicalrevolution. These Kadets denounced both revolution and reaction. TheKadet Central Committee took a similar position, though it placed mostof the blame for the outbreak of violence on the authorities. Paul Mil-iukov, the leader of the Kadets, immediately recognized that the uprisingwould play into the hands of the government. “Witte,” he wrote in Jan-uary 1906, “found unexpected support in the Russian revolutionarymovement which, by its childish goals of ‘armed uprising’ and ‘a demo-cratic republic,’ made that frightening impact on the average citizen onwhich Count Witte relied.”

Ever since he had assumed the office of prime minister, Witte had in-sisted that order would have to be restored before he could proceed withreform, but for two and a half months he had been relatively restrained inseeking to rein in the militant opposition. But on December 15 he in-formed the tsar that the Council of Ministers had decided that the statewas in grave danger and hence a new approach was needed. Whenever thearmy was called on to pacify an unruly crowd, it must deal “decisively andmercilessly” with “all who resist with weapons in their hand.” He toldGeneral V. U. Sollogub in Riga that the radicals in his region were sobloodthirsty that “there is no way to suppress the revolution except byruthless means.” He also suggested to the tsar that it might be advisableto resort to “a radical solution”: the placing of a military man at the headof the government and entrusting him with the coordination of all its op-erations. Even Nicholas was startled by Witte’s new determination to



move forcefully against the left. On January 12, the tsar told his motherthat the prime minister “now . . . wants to hang and shoot everybody. Ihave never seen such a chameleon of a man.”

The crackdown began soon after the start of the Moscow uprising withsome police actions that at the time were considered quite mild. In oneday, a special squad organized by Gerasimov, head of the okhrana in thecapital, conducted three hundred fifty searches and arrests, closed downthree “laboratories” for the production of dynamite and several printingpresses, and confiscated four hundred bombs. The police also carried outfour hundred searches and arrested dozens of political activists, amongthem A. F. Kerensky, who twelve years later, as the minister of justice inthe provisional government, signed the order for Gerasimov’s arrest. Atabout the same time, the government saw to the dismissal of hundreds ofpeople who worked for local organs of government on the ground thatthey were “politically unreliable.”

The government’s most devastating and brutal weapon against the in-surgents and revolutionaries was the punitive expedition, an organizedattack by small groups of specially selected troops in regions either con-trolled by radicals or in a state of unrest. The idea behind the punitiveexpedition was not only to root out disorder but to intimidate the popu-lation by publicly, quickly, and ruthlessly punishing participants in dis-turbances or people suspected of having participated in them. It was, inshort, a form of state terror directed at the state’s own citizens.

How the expeditions originated and who bore responsibility for themis still not quite clear. In his memoirs, Witte conceded that he had advo-cated the use of force “without any sentimentality,” but he insisted thathe had favored such a course only if a revolt had actually broken out.Once order was restored, there were to be no acts of revenge and localauthorities were then to govern in accordance with the law. He claimedto have been stunned when, late in 1905, he was blamed for the govern-ment’s repressive policies.

Witte was not as innocent as he pretended. Apparently, the initial deci-sion to resort to punitive expeditions was taken in great secrecy by seniorofficials at court in consultation with several army generals who were con-cerned with putting down the agrarian unrest that had erupted in the fallof 1905. Even the minister of internal affairs seems not to have played asignificant role in the deliberations. Moreover, military commanders weregiven full control over the expeditions, and the tsar made clear that he ap-proved summary executions of suspected rebels. Nevertheless, there is noevidence that Witte or any other member of the Council of Ministers ar-gued against them after they had begun, and there is some evidence thatthe prime minister defended some of the punitive expeditions. Only in

January and February 1906, when most of the country had already beenpacified, did Witte try to put a halt to the worst excesses.

At least ten punitive expeditionary forces, ranging widely in size andfirepower, were dispatched to various parts of the empire. Major GeneralA. A. Orlov’s force in the Baltic provinces appears to have been the largest,consisting of three infantry regiments, fourteen cavalry squadrons, fourheavy guns, and twenty machine guns. Colonel A. K. Riman, whose taskwas to wrest control of the Moscow-Riazan railroad from the rebels,commanded the smallest force, a single infantry detachment. The ordersto each commanding officer were simply to apply “measures he consid-ers necessary to restore order”; the commanders understood that thesewords granted them carte blanche and that they would not have to an-swer for any excesses committed by their men.

In mid-December 1905, a major expeditionary force began to operatein Siberia, which was in effect cut off from European Russia (the telegraphsystem did not work, and the railways were controlled by strike commit-tees that decided which trains could move westward). On December 13,Tsar Nicholas sent a ciphered telegram to General M. N. Danilov in Na-gasaki, Japan, for transmission to General N. P. Linevich in Siberia (thiswas the only way the ruler could communicate on sensitive matters withhis generals in Asiatic Russia), ordering General Rennenkampf to beginforcing workers on the Siberian and Trans-Baikal railway lines to obey lo-cal authorities. Rennenkampf was to start out in Harbin and move histroops westward on the railway line, making sure, wherever necessary, “tobreak the spirit of resistance and rebellion . . . quickly and with mercilessseverity, with every kind of measure.”

Meanwhile, on December 21, Lieutenant General A. N. Meller-Zakolemskii left Moscow for Siberia with a detachment of about onehundred infantrymen, six cavalrymen, and two machine guns, with ordersto march eastward, restoring order on the way, until he met Rennenkampf.On January 31, 1906, Meller-Zakomelskii sent word to the tsar that infour days he would reach Cheliabinsk and that he had accomplished hismission: “The revolutionary elements on [the railway] lines have beeneliminated, arrested, dismissed; a portion of them have fled. The line isprotected by reliable troops of the 4th Siberian Corps.” By all accounts asadist, Meller-Zakolemskii achieved his success by shooting or hangingdozens of people, flogging hundreds, and arresting thousands.

Punitive expeditions wreaked the greatest amount of havoc in theBaltic provinces, large portions of which had been taken over by rebels.Under the leadership of Lieutenant General V. U. Sollogub, an army ofnineteen thousand men unleashed an unspeakable reign of terror. In theirsweep through the Baltic region, troops summarily executed numerous



citizens and mercilessly flogged peasants and workers, men, women, chil-dren, and even the elderly. It has been estimated that 1,170 people werekilled in the Baltic region between December 1905 and late May 1906.Property damage amounted to two million rubles. Tsar Nicholas, believ-ing that “terror must be met by terror,” did not flinch; on the contrary,he praised one of the generals who had been especially ruthless for “act-ing splendidly.”

Punitive expeditions also operated in the Ukraine and the Caucasus,and although these were not on the same scale as in Siberia and the Balticprovinces, the brutality was comparable. Perhaps the most explicit in-structions on the application of terror were issued by the minister of in-ternal affairs himself on January 6, 1906. Durnovo had learned that un-rest had broken out in the small town of Kagarluka in Kiev Province,where, it was feared, the local police would not be able to protect nearbylanded estates. Durnovo therefore issued the following directive to thegovernor-general of Kiev, V. A. Sukhomlinov: “I earnestly request, in thisand in all similar cases, that you order the use of armed force without theslightest leniency and that insurgents be annihilated and their homesburned in the event of resistance. It is necessary once and for all to stop,with the most severe measures, the spreading willfulness that threatens todestroy the entire state. Under the present circumstance, the restorationof the authority of the government is possible only by these means.” Ar-rests, Durnovo asserted, were useless, for it was impossible to bring hun-dreds of people to justice in small, remote regions of the empire. “Thearmy must be inspired with such orders [as Durnovo issued].”

Two other aspects of the government’s policy of repression should benoted. First, the authorities vastly increased the number of regions placedunder exceptional laws. By the spring of 1906 about 69 percent of theprovinces and regions of the Russian Empire were either completely orpartially subjected to one of the various emergency codes. This develop-ment stood in stark contrast to Witte public declaration of October 17that he would seek to eliminate the exceptional laws.

Second, on December 6, 1905, the tsar signed a ukase that granted gov-ernors and commanders in any region not under exceptional laws the rightto issue permits to wealthy landowners to form militias with their ownfunds. How many landlords actually availed themselves of this opportu-nity to provide for their own defense is not known, but a large number ofsemi-independent armed forces sprang up in the countryside early in 1906and played a significant role in the campaign against agrarian unrest.

The government’s repressive policies proved to be highly effective.Within about four months, the revolutionary movement was in retreateverywhere, incapable of holding the line against the authorities. This

quick victory was achieved by relatively few troops, somewhere betweenthirty and forty thousand men. Some of the units operating in specific re-gions consisted of fewer than two hundred soldiers. The point is that byindiscriminately applying brute force, small contingents of soldiers suc-ceeded in intimidating multitudes of people, many of whom had grownweary of the fifteen-month-old struggle with the autocracy. Needless tosay, the fickleness of formerly disgruntled soldiers played into the hand ofthe government. As soon as the authorities demonstrated their determi-nation to crush the civilian revolution, many mutineers turned into theirloyal tools.

There are no precise figures on the number of victims during the cam-paign of repression, but there can be no doubt that the government’s vic-tory exacted a heavy toll. Thousands of people were killed and the dam-age to property ran to millions of rubles. The jails overflowed withpolitical prisoners, estimates ranging from twenty to one hundred thou-sand. Whatever the exact count, the repression clearly cast a pall over thelives of huge numbers of people.

Public opinion was shocked by the cold-blooded repression. Thechances for a reconciliation between society and the government, slightin the fall of 1905, virtually evaporated in the winter and spring of 1906.A large sector of the liberal movement, never convinced that the govern-ment had been sincere in granting the October Manifesto, now claimedthat the autocratic regime had indeed not undergone any fundamentalchange.

Although this pessimistic assessment is understandable, it cannot beaccepted as an accurate assessment of conditions in Russia early in 1906.The revolutionary turbulence of the preceding eighteen months hadchanged the political landscape of the empire in some fundamental ways.True, the government still controlled the levers of power and had re-gained much of its self-confidence and authority, but the opposition re-mained vibrant enough to continue the struggle, for it had forced the tsarto yield on the principle of autocracy. Indeed, the revolution actually en-tered a new phase in which politics would be the most characteristic,though by no means the only, mode of struggle.

The government itself had seen to that early in December 1905, whenit held a series of meetings, under the chairmanship of Tsar Nicholas, ona new electoral law that was to replace the Bulygin Project of August 6.Issued on December 11, at the very time of the Moscow uprising, the newlaw was more liberal than Bulygin’s, although it did not meet the de-mands of the opposition for a four-tail suffrage. But it vastly increasedthe number of eligible voters, so that somewhere between twenty andtwenty-five million male citizens over the age of twenty-four could cast



ballots. Eligibility depended on the ownership of property or the paymentof taxes, and the population was divided into four curiae: landowners,peasants, town dwellers, and workers. The landowners’ curia chose elec-tors to provincial electoral assemblies in two stages; the peasants chosethem in three stages; town dwellers in two stages; and workers voting indesignated industrial enterprises employing more than fifty workers intwo stages. At the provincial electoral assemblies, where the final choiceof Duma deputies was to be made, electoral power was distributed un-equally: peasants represented 42.3 percent of the electors, landowners32.7 percent, town dwellers 22.5 percent, and workers 2.5 percent. Thisworked out to one elector for every two thousand landowners, four thou-sand urban dwellers, thirty thousand peasants, and ninety thousandworkers. Thus, the vote of one landowner “was equal to that of threeand one-half town dwellers, of fifteen peasants, and of forty-five work-ers.” Women, some seven million agricultural workers, three and a halfmillion servants, two million day laborers, one million constructionworkers, one million employees in commerce, students and persons in ac-tive military service, and a few other small groups were not representedat all. Under this arrangement, peasants were bound to elect a very sub-stantial portion of the Duma, since they constituted well over 70 percentof the total population.

With this elaborate electoral procedure, the government thought it hadachieved two seemingly incompatible goals: it had remained faithful to itspromise in the October Manifesto to extend the suffrage to all classes andit had made inevitable the election of a conservative Duma that woulddefend the interests of the old order. Within four months it became evi-dent that once again the government had thoroughly misread the moodof the nation. Even under the restrictive electoral law of December 11,the population elected a Duma overwhelmingly hostile to the old order.That set the stage for the fierce political conflicts that dominated the finalfifteen months or so of the revolution.

chapter five

Implementing Reform

the search for stability

The implementation of the reforms promised during the October strikein 1905 could hardly have taken place under less auspicious circum-stances. Although the government had regained the upper hand over theopposition and although mass protest movements and mass violencewere not nearly as pervasive throughout 1906 and 1907 as they had beenin 1905, lawlessness and political terror were more widespread. Thissurely reflected the government’s inability to reassert fully its authorityand the continuing, deep hostility that many people felt toward the exist-ing order. Seen in this light, lawlessness may be said to have been politi-cal protest by other means, though there is little doubt that many crimi-nals claimed to be acting out of political motives merely as a pretext.

Equally important, the authorities in St. Petersburg were still incapableof pursuing a steady course. They were unreconciled to the new politicaldispensation, but they feared that repudiation of earlier concessionsrisked reigniting the revolution. As a result, in the first months of 1906the tsar and Witte made so many contradictory statements on major pub-lic issues and adopted so many conflicting policies that the government’sdirection was not discernible. They could not even settle on a consistentdefinition of the tsar’s powers, the most fundamental political questionconfronting the country.

Most surprisingly, Prime Minister Witte, the author of the OctoberManifesto, offered a baffling interpretation of the document. On Decem-ber 29, 1905, the newspaper Novoe vremie reported him as having saidthat the Manifesto had been promulgated by the tsar “on his free will,”and that what the ruler promised, he could annul with a stroke of thepen. In other words, Nicholas continued to exercise power as an autocrat

Implementing Reform 113

with unlimited authority. When a storm of protest erupted, Witte deniedhaving made the remark, but the denial was neither forceful nor con-vincing.

Nicholas himself was equally duplicitous. In response to a delegationfrom the Autocratic-Monarchist Party of the City of Invanovo-Vozne-sensk, which on February 16 expressed its loyalty to him, the tsar initiallysaid that he intended to uphold the October Manifesto of 1905, in whichhe had vowed not to enact any law without the approval of an electedlegislature. But he immediately undermined that statement by declaring,“The autocracy will remain as it was formerly. Thank you for your de-votion to me.” According to a different account of the meeting, the tsaralso promised that he would serve as an autocrat with “unlimited” au-thority.

To add to the confusion, Witte’s authority as prime minister was soshaky that many questioned whether he could be accepted as the authen-tic spokesman of the government. Durnovo, acting head of the Ministryof Internal Affairs, and General Trepov, the commandant of the court,were enormously influential with the tsar and regularly underminedWitte’s authority. “No secret is made of the fact,” a foreign observernoted, “that the prime minister gives orders and makes promises whichhis subordinate [Durnovo] refuses to carry into effect.” Much of the time,in fact, the tsar and his senior advisers ignored the cabinet altogether andrelied on the advice of a “Star Chamber,” which met regularly under thechairmanship of Trepov.

By mid-March there were indications that Witte was no longer capableof coping with the burdens of office. A man of sharp swings in mood, heagain seemed to be in a deep depression. For several days he worked slug-gishly and paid no attention at all to many items that came to his desk.He said little at cabinet meetings, and for several days he did not evenbother to attend meetings of the State Council. According to a newspa-per report, Witte’s physicians had informed him that he was sufferingfrom heart trouble and had advised him to resign. In despair, the primeminister told an acquaintance that

no kind of human energy suffices to enable [me] to bear up under the present sit-uation. Nowhere is there any support for me, everyone criticizes me, no onewants to do any work. Moreover, [all] classes of society are hostile to me, and Ican count on no one for support. It is impossible that people will not at last heedthe wishes of a sick man who is worn out and whose nerves are frayed to thepoint of causing heart trouble.

Witte insisted that he had to quit because he needed a rest; rumors circu-lated in St. Petersburg about his imminent departure from office, this timewithout the usual denials in the official press. Somehow, Witte mustered

up enough energy to remain in his post for a few more weeks, mainly be-cause he wanted to conclude negotiations with foreign governments fora desperately needed loan for Russia.

The government’s most pressing concern early in 1906 was a rash ofterrorist acts. Assassinations of officials were not a new phenomenon inRussian history, dating back at least to the 1870s, but in both scope andform they now assumed a new character. They occurred in many parts ofthe country, and the targets were not only high officials but ordinary po-licemen as well as individuals working in government offices, banks, andin armored cars and railway trains transporting money. Moreover, it wasnow common for political activists facing arrest to offer armed resistance;in the ensuing shootouts, both sides frequently suffered casualties.

Much of the terror was carried out by Socialist Revolutionaries, whoat their first party congress, held in late 1905 and early 1906, voted toinitiate a “partisan war,” defined as peasant attacks on policemen, gov-ernment officials, and jails holding political prisoners, as well as the de-struction of government institutions, official documents, and militarybarracks. The SR Party had at its disposal a sizable group of men andwomen who were idealists with an “almost reverential” attitude towardterror. Led by E. F. Azef (exposed in 1909 as a police provocateur), theSR terrorists often embarked on their missions in a “state of intoxica-tion,” fully aware that they would probably not survive. They claimed tobe motivated not by a desire for revenge on their selected targets but bythe hope and expectation that their example of self-sacrifice would stim-ulate the masses to rebel. In additions to the SRs, there were numeroussmall groups of various political persuasions, most notably anarchists,who engaged in terror. Officially, Marxists rejected individual terror asineffective and a diversion from the all-important task of preparing themasses for the revolutionary struggle. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks didsponsor “partisan actions” or “expropriations”—armed robberies ofbanks or government institutions for the purpose of procuring funds forthe revolution.

Reliable data on the success of these diverse actions during 1906 arehard to come by, but the available evidence suggests that the militantscould boast of some impressive accomplishments. In February, for exam-ple, several men entered the State Bank in Helsingfors (Helsinki), fired sev-eral shots, killing one employee and wounding another, and then made offwith more than 175,000 rubles. In late March a band of twenty armedrevolutionaries executed a successful bank robbery in Moscow, which net-ted them 875,000 rubles, a sum that could procure substantial caches ofweapons. The SRs claimed that throughout 1906 they assassinated eighty-two officials, which seems to be a rather low figure. The government

114 Implementing Reform


claimed that in that year 1,588 people were killed by terrorists. This num-ber included civilians who were accidentally killed when bombs werehurled at officials or during gun battles between terrorists and policemenand soldiers. Judging from the many reports in the press and by foreign ob-servers, the safest conclusion seems to be that the truth lies somewhere be-tween the two statistics, that is, hundreds were killed by militants in 1906.

The police, hard pressed to contain political unrest, also faced a rise inplain and simple criminality. In fact, it became increasingly difficult todifferentiate between acts of political violence and acts of sheer thuggery.Gangs of ruffians, claiming to be motivated by the highest political mo-tives, would rob offices, shops, and private homes. In the month ofMarch 1906 alone, thirty-four cases of armed robbery were reported inthe Odessa press, which was known to exercise a certain amount of self-censorship on this subject. In Kiev there were many more robberies thanone year earlier. In one city after another, senior officials appealed to St.Petersburg for financial help to strengthen police forces, but the govern-ment itself was short of funds and provided assistance to only a few lo-calities where the problems of lawlessness was especially acute. For themost part, local authorities were left to their own devices, and in quite afew regions civilians took initiatives to reinforce the police. Thus, in Sara-tov, Voronezh, Kharkov, Simbirsk, and Poltava provinces, conditions haddeteriorated to such an extent that landlords hired their own guards toprotect their estates.

In cases of severe unrest, the government was inclined to call on thearmy to deal with the unruly, but this policy frequently encountered re-sistance from Rediger, the minister of war, and some senior officers, whofeared that soldiers would become “executioners” and “plunderers.” Thepeople would then come to hate the army and would refuse to support it.The minister was no doubt thinking of the upcoming Duma, whichwould vote on military budgets. Rediger was overruled, but he continuedto raise objections to the use of the military to suppress disorder.

Although a fervent advocate of force, Durnovo also made use of otherweapons. In February 1906, he directed local officials to dismiss civil ser-vants who “by their actions disturb state and public order.” What fol-lowed was an orgy of dismissals that led to an alarming decline in somecritical services. Many doctors who refused to renounce all political ac-tivities were let go, leaving hospitals seriously understaffed. A similarpurge was conducted among teachers suspected of having exerted a per-nicious influence on their students. Some districts suffered losses so largethat entire schools had to be closed.

Durnovo also launched a campaign against the press, which assumedvarious forms. On March 18 and April 26 the tsar approved new, compli-

cated rules on freedom of the press, which tightened government controlover periodicals by requiring that publications eighty pages or longer bepresented to committees on press affairs or to official censors. In addi-tion, the police conducted searches of bookstores, schools, and privatehomes and confiscated literature considered subversive. Frequently thepolice, not the most sophisticated or knowledgeable members of society,made some rather amusing decisions. In Nizhnee, EkaterinoslavProvince, they removed the October Manifesto from the shelves of abookstore because it had been published without a censor’s approval.

The authorities’ main weapon against the press was Article 129 of theCriminal Code. Formulated in sweeping language, the article stated thatanyone guilty of publicly inciting people, by word of mouth or in print,to rebel, to commit treason, or to overthrow the existing system of gov-ernment was to be punished by exile; anyone guilty of inciting people todisobey or oppose the law or to commit a serious crime was subject toimprisonment for up to three years; anyone guilty of publicly encourag-ing men in military service to disregard their obligations would be exiledor imprisoned; and, anyone guilty of fomenting discord between classes,estates (soslovie), or employers and workers would be imprisoned. Sincea very large proportion of the newspapers published at the time were tosome degree opposed to the autocracy, it was relatively easy for officialsto take action against editors and writers on the basis of this vague arti-cle in the Criminal Code.

Few areas of the country escaped the crackdown on the press, and alltold, during the first four months of 1906 officials throughout the empireinitiated more than 450 actions of one kind or another against the press.This harassment certainly created a serious hardship for newspapers andjournals, but the government failed to silence the opposition completely.Many newspapers hired “responsible” or “sitting” editors, whose onlyjob was to answer the call of the police and to accept whatever punish-ment was imposed on the publication. One liberal paper employed “asresponsible editor a long-bearded, impecunious peasant at a salary of fivepounds a month while at liberty, and half as much again while in gaol.”Very often publications that were shut down reappeared within a fewdays under a new name. Confiscating a specific issue of a newspaper didnot do much good either. Since editors generally put their publicationsinto circulation while the censorship committees were still reading them,by the time the censors decided to confiscate an issue, 80 percent of thecopies were already in the hands of vendors. And then there was theusual incompetence of bureaucrats, who appear not to have paid atten-tion to some of the most revolutionary journals: the Bolshevik paperVpered continued until March 1907 to publish appeals to people to pre-pare for an armed uprising.



the electoral campaign

For most of the political parties and political associations that could nowoperate more or less freely, the government’s ambivalent policy of reformand repression posed a serious challenge, making it difficult for them toadopt clearly defined programs at precisely the time—the beginning ofthe campaign for the Duma—when there was an urgent need for them.Only the ultraconservatives, embracing a variety of small monarchist par-ties, seemed to be free of any doubt whatsoever about the proper direc-tion for the Russian polity: they unequivocally urged the renunciation ofthe October Manifesto and the restoration of unlimited autocracy so asto put an end to the unrest that had been endemic in Russia for the pre-ceding year and a half. By contrast, the landed gentry, which during thewinter of 1905–6 turned sharply to the right in reaction to the violencein the countryside and elsewhere, assumed a political posture that canbest be characterized as ambiguous. This emerged at the All-RussianCongress of Marshals of the Nobility early in January 1906, which voicedstrong support for the reorganization of the political system as pro-claimed by the October Manifesto but at the same time called for sternmeasures by the government to restore order. Essentially, then, the landedgentry favored Witte’s policies, though they also expressed criticisms ofhis inconsistency in clamping down on unrest.

The leaders of the Union of October 17, on the other hand, who werealso strong believers in law and order, had misgivings about the harshmeasures Witte was taking to pacify the country. And they were shockedat Witte’s declaration that the Manifesto had not changed the politicalsystem of Russia and that the tsar remained an autocrat with unlimitedauthority. The dismay in Octobrist ranks was so profound that the cen-tral committees of the union in St. Petersburg and in Moscow actuallymet to discuss whether the movement should continue to support thegovernment. One of the Octobrist leaders, Count P. A. Geiden, went sofar as to declare that “it is impossible to believe in Count Witte’s poli-cies.” Only the fear that someone far to the right of Witte—Durnovo, forexample—would replace him prevented the Octobrists from openly call-ing for the prime minister’s dismissal.

Beyond that, the Octobrists were too divided among themselves toformulate a clearly defined program. In early 1906, the union was madeup of seventy-eight organizations in thirty-six provinces, about one-thirdof them in the two capitals. The total membership is not known, butsome notion of its size can be gleaned from the enrollment figure fortwenty-one of the provinces—about twenty-four thousand people. The

principal division was between the rank-and-file members, especiallythose in the provinces, and the leaders in St. Petersburg and Moscow: theformer tended on most issues—such as the repeal of the emergency regu-lations, the agrarian and nationality questions—to favor positions con-siderably to the right of those advocated by the union’s spokesmen in thetwo capitals. Moreover, there were five very small groups that sharedmany of the views of the Octobrists but continued to maintain separateorganizations. The Octobrist leaders wanted to adopt policies that wouldenable them to form electoral alliances with these groups, and this in-evitably disposed them to water down the movement’s program. In short,the Octobrists never settled on a program that provided them with a rec-ognizable “physiognomy,” and the union thus embarked on the electoralcampaign for the Duma without an unmistakable message to potentialsupporters.

The Kadets, the principal spokesmen of Russian liberalism, fared onlyslightly better than the Octobrists in forging a united movement with aprogram acceptable to the bulk of the party membership and with well-defined tactics. To some extent, the divisions within the party can be at-tributed to the fact that a large number of the intelligentsia sympatheticto Kadet goals were individualists, who tended to form small politicalclubs that had too narrow a focus to attract a large following.

But profound ideological divisions also continued to weaken the KadetParty. The right wing considered monarchy virtually a “sacred founda-tion” of the Russian polity, whereas it was an article of faith for the leftwing that Russia must be transformed into a republic. The latter were es-pecially strong in the provinces, where participation in elections under con-ditions of martial law or other emergency regulations did not seem to bepromising or worthwhile. In any case, many left-wingers in the provinceswere reluctant to take part in the elections so long as universal suffrage hadnot been introduced. Finally, the Kadet Party was split over the vexingagrarian issue, some members favoring extensive nationalization of theland and others advocating the retention of private-property rights.

On overall strategy, the Kadets engaged in a careful balancing act,which many people found confusing. The Kadets decided that they wouldparticipate in the upcoming elections because this would provide themwith invaluable practical experience and because a boycott would give theauthorities an easy political victory. Yet the Kadets were not prepared tosever their ties entirely with the revolutionary left. They preferred the pathof legality, but, in the words of one of their leaders, the party “did not denythe necessity and inevitability of revolutionary methods of struggle in ex-ceptional moments of political life.” Nonetheless, the Kadets did drop thedemand for a constituent assembly and spoke instead of a “Duma withconstituent functions.” They still refused to come out unequivocally for



constructive legislative work in the Duma (“organic work,” as it was thencalled), and yet they indicated that in order to pacify the country theywould seek to deal with the agrarian question and would attempt to ex-tend and guarantee political freedom. Finally, the Kadets now dropped thedemand for a “democratic republic” in favor of the more moderate de-mand for a “constitutional and parliamentary monarchy.”

Organizations to the left of the Kadets tended to gravitate toward boy-cotting the Duma elections. Since their basic premise was that the revo-lution was temporarily stalled and would soon erupt again, any actionthat suggested satisfaction with the government’s concessions was seen asa serious mistake, if not a betrayal of the masses. Nevertheless, there wereimportant differences between the Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries,and Bolsheviks on the Duma. Lenin and his Bolshevik followers arguedthat the Duma would be dominated by reactionaries or by liberals whowould enter into compromises with the autocracy, and thus the legisla-ture would serve the cause of the counterrevolution. Hence, the only ac-ceptable policy was one of “active boycott,” which meant “not simplykeeping aloof from the elections but an extensive utilization of electoralmeetings for Social Democratic agitation and organization.”

The Mensheviks, rejecting Lenin’s approach as “nonsense without par-allel,” favored participation in the first two stages of the electoral process(the voting here was direct) and abstaining from the last stage, at whichpoint Duma deputies were to be selected. Such involvement in the elec-toral process, the Mensheviks contended, would give Social Democratsan opportunity to establish links with the masses, which would be help-ful in accelerating the revolutionary process.

The third major revolutionary movement, the Socialist RevolutionaryParty, adopted a position that was in some ways more militant thanLenin’s. Totally disregarding the defeat the revolutionaries had sufferedin Moscow, the SRs contended that the revolution, as one historian hasput it, “does not need to accept crumbs from the table of the old order.”The party should not even agitate against the Duma because even thatwould amount to timid submission to the authorities and a betrayal ofparty principles. The position of the SRs was best summed up by O. S.Minor, a delegate to the party’s congress early in January 1906: “Let [theDuma] be dominated by brazen Black Hundreds, let it be composed ofscoundrels only; that would be better for us, because then there will beno illusions.”

All the predictions by political parties and government officials abouthow events would unfold as the election campaign moved into high gearproved to be incorrect. First, the apprehensions in liberal circles that the

elections to the Duma might never be allowed to take place dissipated inFebruary 1906 as it became clear that the government did not intend tocall them off. Moreover, it turned out that the masses were neither con-servative nor revolutionary. Nor were they indifferent to politics. Theyyearned for far-reaching reform and were prepared to put their trust inthe electoral process. In short, developments since October 1905 hadchanged the political landscape in more basic and subtle ways than any-one recognized. The revolution had not ended, but had instead entered anew phase. By no means completely but to a remarkable degree, the wordreplaced the sword as the main weapon in the struggle between the op-position and the autocracy. This became abundantly clear as the countryembarked on the electoral campaign for the Duma, and the authoritiesproceeded to draft a constitution.

The elections for the 524 deputies, in accordance with the proceduresoutlined on December 11, began at the end of February and in most re-gions of the empire ended in mid-April. They dragged on in some outly-ing regions and in a few the process was not completed even in July. Bythe time the Duma convened on April 27, only 436 deputies had been se-lected, mainly in the central provinces and partly in the Polish provinces.For more than two months, deputies continued to trickle into St. Peters-burg, but at no time did the Duma number more than 499.

Although the government tried in various ways to interfere in the elec-toral process and church officials sought to influence the outcome by ad-vising their parishioners how to vote, opposition candidates were able toconduct far-reaching campaigns and voters managed to cast their ballotsin sizable numbers. All things considered, this first election in Russia in-volving millions of citizens, many of them still illiterate, went off withsurprisingly few hitches. Initially, it seemed as though the people wouldtake little interest in the elections, either out of indifference or out of fearof reprisals. But once the campaign swung into high gear, masses of peo-ple, excited by the opportunity to participate in the political process, ig-nored the entreaties of the church and the repressive measures of the au-thorities. “You know,” remarked one elderly, sick Muscovite after he hadvoted, “all my life I dreamed of this day, dreamed of living until then.” Ac-cording to one reliable estimate, between 50 and 55 percent of the eligiblevoters in thirty-six of the provinces of European Russia cast ballots. In theempire as a whole, participation ranged between 30 and 40 percent.

Of all the parties, the Kadets waged the most extensive and thoroughcampaign. They could draw on a large number of professors, junior uni-versity lecturers, doctors, and lawyers to give lectures and address meet-ings either in public halls or in private apartments. Russkie vedomosti, apaper widely read by the better-educated groups in society, devoted many



columns to the Kadets’ goals and activities, as did the legal journal Pravo.In February 1906, several prominent Kadets launched Rech, a dailynewspaper that attracted a wide readership. By April the Kadets pub-lished between forty and fifty newspapers in the forty-eight provinces ofEuropean Russia in which the party had established an organized pres-ence. In those same provinces, there may have been as many as two hun-dred local party committees. The more active members saw to the distri-bution of hundreds of thousands of copies of the party program, electoralappeals, brochures, and leaflets, most of them printed in various lan-guages. They also pasted proclamations and leaflets on trees and walls.Well-to-do sympathizers contributed generously to party coffers to coverthe cost of these activities.

The Octobrists also formed a national network of organizations forthe election, though in the forty-six European provinces and seven otherregions in which they operated they enlisted a membership only aboutone-fourth as large as that of the Kadets. Still, they distributed a largequantity of campaign literature and one of their leaflets, “On the StateDuma,” had a run of more than 1.1 million copies. In order to maximizetheir chances in the election, the Octobrists formed blocs with the eight-een or so small middle-class groups that fielded candidates, and in a fewlocal areas Octobrists went so far as to form alliances with groups thatwere not even sympathetic to constitutionalism.

Despite the contempt that extremists on the right and left displayed forthe elections, not all of them acted according to their convictions. In fact,the elections placed the ultraconservatives and in particular the Union ofthe Russian People (URP) in a quandary. As firm upholders of the princi-ple of autocracy, they opposed the very idea of a legislature with real pow-ers. Nevertheless, the tsar himself had authorized the creation of a Duma;how could monarchists oppose his will? After some soul-searching, theURP decided to form a bloc with other monarchist groups and to takepart in the elections in the hope that the Duma would prove to be loyal tothe autocrat. The URP and its allies conducted their campaign prettymuch the way the other parties did, but they were not sufficiently well or-ganized to exert a strong influence on the outcome.

The Bolsheviks, and in particular Lenin, campaigned on a simple plat-form: anyone who supported revolution must be against the Duma, andanyone who favored the Duma must be against revolution. The successof the boycott that they advocated depended generally on the strength ofrevolutionary groups in a particular city, but on the whole it was quite ef-fective. In Warsaw, for example, virtually all workers stayed away fromthe polls. In 49 percent of all industrial enterprises in St. Petersburg andin 70 percent of the enterprises in the suburbs, workers did not vote at

all. A Soviet historian contended that the strategy of “active boycott”proved to be of “enormous general political and psychological signifi-cance for the proletariat in the capital.” Tired and depressed over the de-feats of late 1905, the proletariat were invigorated by the Bolshevik cam-paign. But that campaign also influenced the outcome of the election in adirection neither foreseen nor desired by the Bolsheviks. The absence ofviable working-class candidates facilitated victories by the Kadets.

During the first two weeks or so of the electoral campaign, the gov-ernment exuded great confidence about the outcome. The Duma, it wasbelieved, would be predominantly peasant and loyal to the old order. TheKadets, by contrast, were thoroughly pessimistic and ascribed the poorshowing of the opposition to government repression. But by mid-Marchthe mood of both groups suddenly changed. Returns from St. Petersburgand Moscow showed remarkable strength by the Kadets, and soon re-sults from other urban centers indicated that this trend would continue.The final result was a victory beyond the dreams of any Kadet leader.And then another shock awaited the authorities: it became evident thatthe deputies elected by the peasants would not be conservative at all.Now V. I. Gurko, an ultraconservative senior official, contemptuously re-ferred to them as “a herd led by a few Kadet intellectuals.” Equally dis-appointing to the government, the rightists did poorly, receiving onlyabout 5 percent of all the votes. The Octobrists did somewhat better, butthe few victories they scored seem to have been personal triumphs of in-dividual leaders rather than expressions of support for Octobrism assuch. The elections demonstrated beyond doubt, as one observer put it,“the deep feeling of resentment ag[ainst] the Govt. which seems to per-vade all classes.”

The most reliable breakdown of the political affiliation of the deputies(at the time when 478 had been elected) is:

Political affiliation No.Kadets (with adherents) 185Nonpartisans 112Socialists (SD, SR, PSP) 17Other left (incl. Trudoviks)1 94Progressives (incl. Peaceful Renewal) 25Polish National Democrats 32Octobrists (with other moderates) 13Extreme right 0

The deputies represented a wide range of social groups. The largest


1. On the Trudoviks, see below, p. 133.


contingents came from the peasantry (231) and the nobility (180), withmost of the rest divided among Cossacks (14), merchants (16), and lowermiddle class (24). About one hundred of the noble deputies werelandowners, some of whom were also engaged in other occupations, andabout one hundred of the peasant deputies worked on the land. Sixty-seven deputies earned their living in trade and industry, forty-five assalaried employees, and twenty-five as workers; seventeen of them wereclergymen. Slightly more than one-fifth (108) of the deputies belonged toone or another of the intelligentsia professions, and this group not sur-prisingly came to play a major role in the Duma’s debates and parliamen-tary maneuvers. Wags, fearing that the intelligentsia’s penchant for takingdoctrinaire positions would paralyze the assembly, recalled HeinrichHeine’s quip about the Frankfurt Assembly in 1848: “140 Professoren—armes Vaterland, Du bist verloren” (140 professors—wretched fatherland,you are lost).

Elated by their victory, the Kadets expected the Duma to bring aboutfundamental changes in the political system. Miliukov, their preeminentleader, predicted that the parliament would quickly succeed in turning Rus-sia into a constitutional monarchy in which the Duma would be the dom-inant political force. The Kadets were deluding themselves. Impressive astheir victory had been, the Kadets’ popular support was not as extensiveand deep as many party activists assumed. If the electoral system had beenmore democratic—for example, had suffrage been universal and direct—and if the process of political mobilization had been further advanced, theKadets would almost certainly not have fared as well as they did.

More to the point, the Kadets did not reckon with the resourcefulnessof the authorities and their determination to hold the line against the de-mands of the opposition. The government and its supporters werestunned by the outcome, and Witte was so distressed that he “again be-gan to show signs of extreme nervousness and irritability.” But the tsar,who seems to have taken little interest in the election, still believed thatthe peasant deputies would support him. When someone suggested thatthese deputies would demand the expropriation of large tracts of land, heresponded, “Then we will have to thumb our nose at them.”

Witte was more realistic than Nicholas and despite ill health devotedhimself to two challenging projects designed to bolster the old order: pro-curement of a foreign loan and the formulation of rules under which thegovernment and the Duma would operate once the legislature met. Eachwas a Herculean task and in view of Witte’s precarious tenure it is aston-ishing that he accomplished as much as he did.

Largely because of the war with Japan, Russia’s financial situation haddeteriorated drastically. Within two years, from January 1904 to January1906, what had been a surplus of some 381 million rubles had turned


into a deficit of 158 million rubles. The projections for 1906 was a deficitof more than 481 million rubles. By February that year, it was widelyfeared in St. Petersburg that the government would not be able to meetits payroll; inevitably, the authorities were concerned about the reliabil-ity of an army whose men were not receiving their allowances. The busi-ness community panicked, and many affluent citizens continued to sendgold and other forms of capital abroad. Witte used every form of persua-sion at his command, including large bribes to the French press in returnfor articles favorable to Russia, as well as various diplomatic maneuvers,to obtain help from abroad. In the end, the French government concludedthat, however risky, a loan was justified: it would bolster the alliance withRussia and prevent a rapprochement between Russia and Germany.

The contract for the loan, the largest ever for Russia, was signed inParis on April 16, 1906 (Western calendar). A consortium of French,British, Austrian, Dutch, and Russian banks advanced a total of 2.25 bil-lion francs at 5 percent interest. The French banks assumed the largestshare of the loan, almost one-half. For Witte, this was a great personaltriumph, as even Tsar Nicholas grudgingly acknowledged. The loan sta-bilized the country’s finances and made it possible for Russia to remainon the gold standard. It also provided the government with the where-withal to carry out its functions for about a year without regard to thewishes of the Duma. It was for this reason that Witte was determined tosecure the funds before the legislature met.

The opposition deeply resented the government’s action, whichamounted to a cavalier disregard of the Duma at the very moment of itselection. The Kadets went so far as to denounce the financial agreementas “unconstitutional” because it had been concluded before the Dumamet, even though they realized that the reforms they wished to institutewould require financial assistance from abroad. Thus, Witte’s action fur-ther poisoned the political atmosphere, but he also paid a personal pricefor his success. Once he had procured the loan, he was no longer per-ceived by the tsar to be indispensable as prime minister.

drafting a “constitution”

Ironically, the one other achievement of Witte during his last weeks in of-fice, the full implementation of the promise in the October Manifesto toestablish a national legislature, also proved to be politically counterpro-ductive. The election itself satisfied only one part of the promise. Thegovernment also had to define the powers and rules of the legislature and


determine the role of other institutions in the legislative process. Late in1905, senior officials began to discuss transforming the State Council, apurely advisory body established by Tsar Alexander in 1810, into a sec-ond chamber with real powers, a possibility not even hinted at in theManifesto. On February 14 and 16, the Crown Council, chaired by thetsar himself, discussed the proposal for a reformed State Council as wellas regulations governing the conduct of affairs by the Duma. Thirty-ninedignitaries, some of them from outside the government, participated, andthe tsar always made the final decision on specific issues. The minutes ofthe meetings are fascinating, for they reveal the extraordinary reluctanceof many notables even at this stage of the revolution to accept basicchanges in the political system. And some, most notably Witte, who hadappeared to have made their peace with fundamental political reform,sought to minimize the significance of the changes by using obscurantistlanguage to describe the new, emerging polity.

The project for the reformed State Council was thoroughly conserva-tive. It transformed the State Council into a legislative body with powersequal to those of the Duma. A measure introduced in the Duma would besent to the tsar for his consideration only if both houses had voted in itsfavor. Then, to avoid placing on the tsar the “entire burden of resolvingdifferences” between the legislative chambers the authors of the projectdevised rules for the selection of the upper chamber that would yield amembership compliant to the wishes of the sovereign. Half the one hun-dred ninety-eight members were to be appointed by the tsar and, ofcourse, they could be relied on to do his bidding. The remaining ninety-eight members of the new council were to be elected by various socialgroups according to the following formula: the dvorianstvo (nobility)would elect eighteen; the provincial zemstvo assemblies, thirty-four; largelandowners in provinces without zemstvo assemblies, twenty-two; theOrthodox clergy, six; the Academy of Sciences and universities, six; thecommercial and industrial class, twelve. The councilors served for nineyears, which meant that they enjoyed less independence than their pred-ecessors, who used to be appointed for life.

On February 20 the tsar signed the documents enacting into law theseproposals, but only after making a change of his own. He added oneword to the description of his “supreme authority”; it became “supremeautocratic authority,” a stark reminder to the country that Nicholas didnot believe that he had yielded any of his prerogatives.

The public reaction to the documents was predictable. The conserva-tive press hailed them because they appeared to leave the basis of theRussian state system intact. The Octobrists, by contrast, were split. At ameeting of the central committee in late February, Shipov and most of the

representatives from Moscow spoke out strongly against the reformedState Council, but the Kadets, as expected, vehemently condemned thegovernment for having staged what, in their view, amounted to a coupd’état. Miliukov repudiated the government’s action as an “insult” to theDuma and warned that “there can be no doubt that the struggle againstthe very existence of the [State] Council has become a new slogan of theliberation movement, and thus does not facilitate but complicates thetask of pacifying the country.” The men in authority were not intimi-dated. Within two months, they issued a new compilation of the Funda-mental Laws—essentially a codification of all laws of the empire—thatfurther demonstrated their determination to renege on certain basic com-mitments they had made in October 1905.

Apparently, discussion of a revision of the Fundamental Laws beganlate in 1905, when Trepov, the commandant of the court and a maliciousintriguer, suggested that a new code, which would be regarded as a con-stitution, should be issued and should have a liberal thrust. As Witte tellsit, Trepov knew that this would prove to be disastrous for the country,and that the prime minister—whom the commandant of the court de-spised—would receive most of the blame. There is evidence to supportthese charges against Trepov. The first draft of the new FundamentalLaws was fairly liberal, and Trepov had made strenuous efforts to ex-clude both Witte and the Council of Ministers from the work of revision.Only after Witte protested vehemently were he and the cabinet includedin the deliberations.

Witte quickly saw to it that the draft was purged of its liberalism.Now a strong supporter of repression, he was also eager to demonstrateto the tsar and to ultraconservatives that he was loyal to the throne. Bymid-March Witte, through wily maneuvers at court, actually gained con-trol over the process of revision, and at four meetings on April 7 andApril 12 of another Crown Council, also chaired by the tsar, a new draftwas approved. It seemed to be exactly what Nicholas would havewanted, but when Trepov submitted to Nicholas a memorandum he hadreceived from several Kadets proposing some changes in a more liberaldirection, the tsar began to waver. Alarmed, Witte telephoned Trepov andwarned him of “a great disaster” if the Fundamental Laws were notadopted before the Duma met on April 27. The legislature would surelyact on its own to provide the country with new Fundamental Laws, andthey would not be to the monarch’s liking. Witte’s argument persuadedthe tsar, who on April 23 sent a ukase to the Ruling Senate ordering thepublication of the Fundamental Laws, making them the law of the land.Although the authorities rigorously avoided the use of the word “consti-tution” because of its Western overtones, the Fundamental Laws



amounted to nothing less. They provided a detailed framework for theoperation of the government and for the enactment of laws. But the new“constitution” had a special feature: unlike all other laws it could be re-vised only on the tsar’s initiative.

This was not its only conservative feature. It also stipulated that thetsar retained a veto power over all legislative measures as well as controlof the state’s administration, of foreign policy, of the military forces, andof the appointment of all ministers. Moreover, the monarch had the rightto impose martial law or states of emergency on regions beset by unrest;he alone could pardon convicts and commute penalties handed down bycourts; he alone could issue a “general forgiveness” to criminals; and heremained the “Head of the Church,” which he administered through theMost Holy Ruling Synod. Finally, the tsar retained the authority to dis-solve the Duma at his discretion; the only condition was that the ukaseof dissolution must indicate when new elections would be held and whenthe new Duma would be convoked.

Several other features of the Fundamental Laws are worth noting. Thedecrees of February 20 were incorporated into them, making it impossi-ble for the Duma to revoke those measures. If the legislatures failed toadopt a budget at the beginning of the fiscal year, the previous budgetwould remain in force. The list of civil rights was quite modest: the Fun-damental Laws provided for due process, the inviolability of privateproperty, freedom of the assembly, freedom of expression (“within thelimits fixed by law”), freedom of association (“for purposes not contraryto laws”), and freedom of religion, although “the conditions under which[the people] may avail themselves of this freedom are determined bylaw.” When the Duma was in recess, the government could govern by de-cree, which would become a dead letter if not passed by both houses ofthe legislature within two months after they reconvened.

If the constitution of 1906 marked a liberalization of the political or-der that had existed at the beginning of the revolution in 1904, it was afar cry from the aspirations of liberal society. Even more important, itmet few of the expectations that had been aroused in October 1905,when the revolution seemed to have triumphed. Had it not been for thefact that the elections had produced a Duma overwhelmingly hostile tothe old order, the opposition might well have concluded that the autoc-racy had inflicted a fatal blow on the revolution.

Before the Duma met, however, the court on April 22 announced thedeparture of Witte as prime minister. This was not surprising and did notevoke much public distress. It was known that Witte and the tsar couldnot abide each other, and Witte’s political twists and turns since October1905 had thoroughly discredited him. But he had been such a powerful

presence at the pinnacle of the bureaucracy for almost a decade and ahalf that his departure posed a serious challenge to the court: Would it beable to come up with a person capable of dealing with the many in-tractable problems facing the nation?

Amazingly, despite the court’s eagerness to see the last of Witte, it hadno plans for the succession. The minister of justice from 1906 to 1915,I. G. Shcheglovitov, revealed in 1917 that the new cabinet was “formedentirely accidentally,” in a haphazard way. It appears that Shcheglovitov’spredecessor, M. G. Akimov, had been asked if he would serve as primeminister, but he “categorically refused” on the ground that he felt “com-pletely unprepared” for that position. Asked to make a recommendation,Akimov proposed I. L. Goremykin. For two days the tsar and his advis-ers mulled over their possibilities while all the ministers remained in ig-norance about their future. Then, on April 24 the tsar announced the se-lection of a new government whose only distinguishing feature was itslack of distinction.

To be fair, several men in the new government were competent bu-reaucrats, but the prime minister, Goremykin, was so obviously a has-been that society was taken by surprise by his appointment, and virtuallyno one could be found to say a good word about him. Kokovtsov, an in-telligent and experienced civil servant, actually refused Goremykin’s of-fer of the post of minister of finance because of his doubts about theman’s abilities. The tsar then invited Kokovtsov for an audience to per-suade him to change his mind. “I frankly expressed to the tsar all myfears about Ivan Logginovich’s [Goremykin’s] personality, his great indif-ference toward everything, his utter inability to compromise, and his out-spoken unwillingness to meet the new elements of our state life, whichwould not only fail to help us get acquainted with them but would serveto increase the opposition.” Nicholas granted that Kokovtsov might beright, but he also indicated that nothing could be done, since Goremykinhad already accepted the post. In any case, the tsar was confident that thenew prime minister “will not act behind my back” and would not doanything to “damage my authority”; clearly, Nicholas was determinednot to be saddled with a prime minister who would be as independent asWitte. Still, if Kokovtsov had made up his mind not to serve in the cabi-net, the tsar assured him that he would honor his wishes. Nonetheless,late in the evening of April 25, Kokovtsov received a package announcinghis appointment as minister of finance. Goremykin, it turned out, insistedon the appointment, and Nicholas simply signed a ukase to that effectwithout first informing Kokovtsov. Not prepared to disobey a directivefrom the tsar, Kokovtsov agreed to serve.

Goremykin had begun his career in government service in 1866 at the



age of twenty-seven and had held several high positions before he becameminister of internal affairs in 1895. In that post, he acquired the reputa-tion of being a “red,” but as Miliukov put it somewhat unkindly, only be-cause he served in the position between two unyielding reactionaries. Ac-tually, as minister of internal affairs he did advocate the extension ofself-government to the western provinces, a major reason for his dis-missal in 1899. He had become considerably more conservative by 1906,but that was not the main reason why he was universally considered abad choice. He was a colorless man without firm convictions or anystrong urge to exercise leadership. One senior official dismissed Gore-mykin as “an indolent person who is not at all interested in politics. Heasked for only one thing, that he be bothered as little as possible.”Clearly, he was not a suitable head of government under the new and dif-ficult conditions prevailing in Russia in 1906.

Except for Kokovtsov, P. Kh. Schwanebach was the only person in thecabinet with experience in national domestic affairs, and he was more in-terested in gaining support for ultra-right-wing causes and intrigues thanin running the Office of the State Comptroller. Witte described him as aman whose only merit lay in the fact “that he had fallen in with a Mon-tenegrin princess.” The minister of internal affairs, P. A. Stolypin, whowill loom large later in this study, was without question a highly compe-tent person and a vast improvement over the hard-line and highly un-popular Durnovo, but he had no experience in national politics. The newminister for foreign affairs, A. P. Izvolskii, was an able and sensiblediplomat who did not want to accept the cabinet position because he felt“inadequately prepared,” having been “out of active diplomatic servicefor three years.” He finally accepted the appointment, “quite against mywill,” only because the man he had recommended, D. A. Nedilov, refusedto be considered. Most of the other cabinet members were mediocre andunimaginative bureaucrats, hardly the type of people capable of findingcommon ground with a Duma that was overwhelmingly hostile to thetsarist regime.

By the same token, the mood of liberal leaders was hardly conduciveto cooperation with the government. Reinvigorated by their victory in theelection and their fury over the last steps of the outgoing government,many liberals were resolved to go on the offensive. If in January thewatchwords had been caution and ambiguity, now in April they weremilitancy and maximalism. For example, A. A. Kizevetter made a men-acing prediction: “If . . . the Duma is dissolved, that will be the govern-ment’s last act, after which it will cease to exist.” At the Third Congressof the Kadet Party, which ended its deliberation on April 25, just twodays before the Duma met, Miliukov’s denunciation of the government

for having enacted the Fundamental Laws was warmly applauded: “Likethieves in the dead of night,” Miliukov thundered, “all the specialists onstate law organized, [and] . . . staged a conspiracy against the people. . . .That which we read in the newspapers today is a fraud, a fraud againstthe people, and we must immediately answer this fraud.” Also at the con-gress, the Kadets formally adopted four theses that called for the follow-ing reforms: universal, equal, direct, and secret suffrage, including the ex-tension of the vote to women; agrarian reform; legislation on the workersand nationalities question; full amnesty for political prisoners and an endto capital punishment; and a “parliamentary inquiry of all illegal actionstaken by the administration in its struggle with the social movement sinceOctober 17.” The Kadets acknowledged that the pursuit of their goalscould lead to a clash with Goremykin, but they insisted that if a rupturebecame inevitable, they would see to it that the onus would fall on thegovernment. By the standards of the time and under the circumstancesthen prevailing in Russia, the Kadet program was so far-reaching andradical that cooperation between the Duma and the government was outof the question. The struggle over Russia’s political system was far fromover.


chapter six

The Duma

the first steps of the legislature

The government was very apprehensive about the convocation of theDuma. Although officials permitted citizens of St. Petersburg to celebratethe event by decorating their homes with flags and to manifest their sup-port by peaceful gatherings, their fear of “stormy meetings, processions,and demonstrations with criminal speeches and revolutionary songs” wasso strong that they ordered the police and army to maintain a large pres-ence on the streets of the capital. According to a newspaper account, St.Petersburg did not have the appearance of a city eager to welcome thepeople’s representatives. “It resembled, rather, a city prepared to meet anenemy. Everywhere in all the streets soldiers were parading with all kindsof weapons, and so were policemen, some on horse and some on foot,[all] armed with rifles.”

After much bickering with each other over whether the tsar shouldhave any contact with Duma deputies, senior officials decided to invitethe legislators to the Winter Palace, where Nicholas would open theDuma sessions with an “Address from the Throne.” Once that decisionhad been reached, the court spared no effort in arranging a grand and“wonderful display.” In a vivid description of the event, the Americanambassador to St. Petersburg noted, “In the throne room of the WinterPalace there was an assemblage of people different from any that has evertaken place in the history of Russia. On the left of the throne, taking upan entire left side of the hall, were the members of the Duma, in every con-ceivable costume, the peasants in rough clothes and long boots, merchantsand trades people in frock coats, lawyers in dress suits, priests in long garband almost equally long hair, and even a Catholic bishop in violet robes.On the opposite side of the hall were officers in braided uniforms,

courtiers covered with decorations, Generals, members of the Staff andmembers of the Imperial Council.” The ambassador further noted that“the contrast between those on the left and those on the right was thegreatest one that one could possibly imagine, one being a real represen-tation of different classes of this great Empire, and the other of what theautocracy and bureaucracy has been.” Within half an hour, Nicholas andhis courtiers appeared in the hall and after a religious ceremony, he pro-ceeded to the throne. To the ambassador’s surprise, many of the deputies“did not even return the bows of His Majesty, some giving an awkwardnod, others staring at him coldly in the face, showing no enthusiasm, andeven almost sullen indifference. As he rose again from the throne, therewas absolute stillness. He then proceeded in a firm voice to read his ad-dress. When he finished there was a tremendous outbreak of applause,but limited almost entirely to the right side of the hall, the deputies on theother side remaining quiet.”

In truth, the tsar’s speech was inappropriate for the occasion. Al-though not explicitly provocative, the address was so vague as to suggesta lack of serious interest in the work of the Duma. It did not include asingle proposal for reform, and this was bound to offend even the mod-erate deputies. After all, the legal and peaceful reform of Russia’s politi-cal, economic, and social institutions was a primary reason for the estab-lishment of the Duma in the first place. In urging the deputies to “justifyin a worthy manner the confidence of the tsar and the nation,” Nicholasconfined himself to words that appeared to be gracious and generous butin fact did not in any way meet the concerns of the liberals and moderateleft, not to mention the radicals. Far from promoting goodwill and har-mony, the encounter in the Winter Palace between the privileged and theelected representatives only demonstrated, and deepened, the distrustwith which the two sides eyed each other.

Popular support for the Duma was high throughout Russia, anddeputies were greeted very warmly as they made their way from the Win-ter Palace to the Tauride Palace, a two-story, white building erected latein the eighteenth century. An imposing structure on a large plot of landin an angle of the Neva River, it could be protected fairly easily, since itwas isolated from the main parts of the city and was within easy reach ofseveral military barracks. When the deputies approached the palace, theywere startled to discover the streets surrounding the building filled withfive to six thousand “ordinary people,” who hugged them, kissed them,squeezed their arms, and cried out “amnesty.” The cordial receptionmade a deep impression on the deputies, several of whom delivered shortspeeches calling for calm and promising to implement the wishes of thepeople. Once inside the hall, the deputies wasted no time in taking up acritical and highly sensitive issue.

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Many deputies, in fact, wanted the Duma immediately to pass a reso-lution demanding complete amnesty for political prisoners, but theKadet leaders did not wish to initiate the proceedings with a move thatwould be regarded as provocative by the tsar, who, according to the Fun-damental Laws, retained the right to grant amnesties. As a compromise,the Kadets arranged to have I. I. Petrunkevich deliver, at the very start ofthe deliberations, a short and eloquent address, the theme of which wasthat “we cannot now refrain from expressing all our accumulated feel-ings, our cries from the heart, and say that free Russia demands the lib-eration of all victims.” The speech marked the start of a pattern of con-duct of the Duma necessitated by the ideological makeup of themembership: the adoption by the Kadet leadership of procedures thatwould enable the legislature to express the wishes of the more militantdeputies without trying to enact legislation that the government wouldconsider provocative.

So long as the Kadet leaders sought to shape the Duma’s agenda, theyhad no choice but to opt for such a two-pronged strategy. Only about 37percent of the deputies belonged to the Kadet Party, and even they weresharply divided. Much of the time but not always, the Kadets could counton the support of the Trudoviks (or Labor Group), whose strengthranged from 94 to 135 deputies. About 80 percent of the latter were ofpeasant origin, though most were now intellectuals. More militant onideological issues and on tactics than the Kadets, the Trudoviks did notsubscribe to a clearly defined doctrine and did not act as a well-disci-plined fraction. In their midst were SRs, nonparty socialists, SDs, LeftKadets, and about twenty-five of them described themselves as “non-party” deputies and twenty-six remained “undefined.”

Another group in the Duma, numbering slightly more than one hun-dred, never joined any party, apparently because of fear of punishment bythe authorities in the localities where they had been elected. Many ofthem sympathized with the Kadets or other opposition parties, but some,generally Russian landowners and nobles, tended to be conservative,though not reactionary. Finally, about sixty deputies aligned themselveswith the Autonomous group, which strove to advance the interests of thenational minorities. The Polish Circle (Kolo) composed the largest num-ber (thirty-two) within this fraction. To add to the complexity, a fairnumber of deputies moved from one group to another during the seventy-two days the Duma remained in session, and the arrival of newly electedrepresentatives from the outlying parts of the empire not only changed thenumerical makeup of the parties but led to the formation (in mid-June) ofa Social Democratic fraction composed of seventeen members.

By virtue of their relative cohesiveness, political experience, and nativetalents, the Kadets quickly secured a predominant position in the Duma.

They occupied a large number of the leading posts in the legislature andtheir leader, Miliukov, was the outstanding strategist and tactician notonly of his party but of the Duma as a whole, even though he was barredfrom serving as a deputy because the paper he edited had published theFinancial Manifesto. A man of great intelligence and energy, Miliukovwould sit in the press gallery during most of the Duma’s sessions andmaintain contact with the deputies. He was the key person in all the ne-gotiations the Kadets conducted, whether with other parties, with thecourt, or with government officials. Probably the second most importantman in the Duma was the Kadet S. A. Muromtsev, who was elected pres-ident, a position roughly comparable to the post of Speaker in the U.S.House of Representatives. A professor of law at Moscow University,Muromtsev had the ideal training for one of his major tasks, the formu-lation of the rules under which the Duma would operate (these rules re-mained essentially unchanged during the next three Dumas, which func-tioned until 1917).

One of the Duma’s first tasks was to prepare an “Answer to theThrone” in response to the tsar’s address. Miliukov wanted to adopt thecustom of the British parliament, which responds formally to themonarch’s address to the first session of a new parliament. It appeared tobe an astute strategy, for it would suggest that the Duma was assumingprerogatives similar to that of the British counterpart. But in Britain themonarch’s address is in fact composed by the prime minister and repre-sents the basic principles of his or her party, which commands a majorityin parliament. In Russia, the address was written in secret by the tsar’s as-sistants (and edited by the ruler himself), who repudiated the goals of thedominant parties in the legislature. Thus, any “Answer to the Throne”drafted by the Duma was bound to be unlike Parliament’s response to themonarch. The “Answer” in Russia necessarily amounted to a statementof the opposition’s program, which was thoroughly hostile to the pre-vailing order and was therefore bound to provoke resentment in govern-ment circles.

That is precisely what happened when the Duma’s Committee of 33produced a draft on May 2. The document called for political changes ofthe most fundamental kind, changes that would transform the country’spolitical system into a liberal constitutional monarchy with paramountauthority vested in the Duma. It also called for agrarian reform that in-cluded the compulsory alienation of private land. At least three de-mands—radical changes in the authority of the State Council, the estab-lishment of ministerial responsibility, and amnesty to all politicalprisoners—clearly went beyond the bounds of the Duma’s authority asdefined in the Fundamental Laws; only the tsar had the right to take the

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initiative in proposing such changes. The text was nevertheless greetedwith prolonged applause, and after three days of debate it was unani-mously adopted (eight deputies left the chamber before the balloting sothat the measure could pass without any negative votes).

Predictably, this action evoked great consternation within the govern-ment. Apparently, only General Rediger’s plea that more attempts bemade to cooperate with the Duma persuaded the cabinet not to de-nounce, and possibly dissolve, the legislature. But then Nicholas, deter-mined to assert his prerogatives, made a point of rebuffing the Duma byrefusing to allow a delegation of deputies led by Muromtsev to deliverthe “Answer” to him in person. To add insult to injury, the court did noteven communicate directly with President Muromtsev; the prime minis-ter informed Muromtsev of the tsar’s decision and asked that the “An-swer” be sent to him. He would then pass it on to Nicholas. Many peo-ple and virtually all Duma deputies were stunned, and the cry rang out,“The Government is defying us.” Eager to avoid an open clash, a Kadetdeputy, P. I. Nogorodtsev, declared in the chamber that the importance ofthe “Answer” lay in its content, not in the manner in which it was com-municated to the authorities. His proposal that the body simply pass onto the next item of business was readily adopted.

Neither the tsarist authorities nor the Duma emerged unscathed fromthis first skirmish. The Duma leaders, and especially the Kadets, who hadpromised to limit their demands within the confines of the FundamentalLaws, now appeared to be more interested in a power struggle than inimplementing reforms on specific issues. Meanwhile, the tsar’s gratuitousrebuff of the Duma’s delegation only served to embitter the legislators,making cooperation even more unlikely. “From this day on,” Kokovtsovnoted, “the conflict between the Duma and the tsar himself, was defi-nitely declared—a conflict which every day intensified.”

After extensive discussions lasting several days, the cabinet decidedthat the prime minister should deliver an official response to the “An-swer” in the Duma. When he appeared in the chamber on May 13, every-one sensed that the government’s statement would be a momentousevent. Goremykin’s hands “were shaking with agitation” as he read thespeech in a voice “hardly audible.” After a few conciliatory commentsabout the government’s readiness to work with the Duma, he displayedutter inflexibility and arrogance. He announced that the deputies’ pro-posal on the agrarian question was “absolutely inadmissible” because itwould violate the principle of the inviolability of property. Nor could thecabinet agree to the establishment of a ministry enjoying the confidenceof a majority of the Duma, the abolition of the State Council, the elimi-nation of various legal limitations placed on the Duma, or the granting of

amnesty to political prisoners. The government would not even considerthese measures.

Goremykin ended his address on a positive note, listing the projectsfor reform—such as colonization of Asiatic Russia, facilitating peasantwithdrawal from communes, granting peasants full legal equality, reor-ganization of the system of public schools—that the government plannedto bring to the Duma for its consideration. But he offered no specifics onthese projects. He then called on the deputies to help restore calm to thecountry.

No sooner had the prime minister completed his remarks than onedeputy after another rose to denounce his speech and his policies. Thedeputies reacted to these attacks on the government with prolonged ap-plause. Moreover, no one came to Goremykin’s defense and no one repu-diated the thinly disguised threat by the Trudovik A. F. Aladin to unleasha revolution. Even the Octobrist Count P. A. Geiden, always a cautiousman, urged the government to resign.

The declamations in the Duma—one can hardly call the proceedings adebate—continued for several hours, after which the president read theresolution that had been submitted to the chamber for adoption. It was aremarkably blunt statement: because the government had refused to meetthe demands of the people enumerated in the “Answer to the Throne”and had shown contempt for the interests of the people, the legislaturedeclared its complete lack of confidence in the government and de-manded its immediate resignation and replacement by a cabinet enjoyingthe confidence of the State Duma. Four hundred and forty deputies votedfor the resolution; only eleven voted against it, and ten of them subse-quently indicated that they had done so only because they questioned itslegality, not because they wished to support the government. The Dumahad thrown down another gauntlet.

The comments by several deputies on the likelihood of violence frombelow if the government did not yield to the Duma caused a considerableamount of “nervousness” among senior officials, who ordered all troopsin St. Petersburg to be kept under standing orders. But when it becameclear that there would be no unrest, the prime minister regained his com-posure and adopted a stance toward the legislature that astonished evensome of those who were hostile to it. He decided to treat the Duma withutmost contempt. He would ignore it; he would not bother to attend itssessions and urged his ministers also to stay away. If government officialswere summoned by deputies to answer queries, ministers should sendsubordinates to speak in their behalf. Goremykin also indicated that hewould act, as his minister of foreign affairs put it, “as if [the deputies] didnot exist.”

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Stolypin was now the only minister who regularly attended the Dumadebates, and the government did not bother to introduce any significantlegislative proposals. It was not until May 15 that it submitted two bills,both of them trivial: one called for the establishment of a local school,and the other for the building of a steam laundry and a greenhouse forthe University of Iuriev.

Instead of preparing legislative proposals, the authorities—even beforethe prime minister’s defiant speech—directed their energies on a cam-paign against the Duma. On May 5 and for several days thereafter, Pravi-telstvennyi vestnik, a government daily, printed a series of telegrams thatthe tsar had received from right-wing groups reviling the legislature anddemanding its dissolution. Among other things, the groups charged thatthe Duma had acted “in a revolutionary spirit,” was bent on destroyingthe state, sought to seize power, and had even cooperated with foreignerswho planned to “encroach upon the unity and integrity of the state.”Taken aback, thirty-six deputies proposed an interpellation; after the leg-islature gave its approval, the prime minister was asked to appear forquestioning.

According to the rules of the Duma, deputies could conduct an inter-pellation whenever any government department was suspected of wrong-doing. The minister of that department was expected to answer thedeputies’ queries in person. In this instance, deputies wished to knowwho had authorized the publication of the telegrams and why they hadbeen published. They intended to compel the prime minister to state ex-plicitly whether he and the tsar agreed with the contents of the telegrams.

Goremykin refused even to respond to the request, on the ground thatthe telegrams to the monarch had nothing to do with the work of theDuma, which, he insisted, had the right to interpellate the governmentonly on issues that bore directly on legislative proposals.

In part, Goremykin’s behavior can be explained by his convictionthat the revolutionary tide had been turned back, making accommoda-tion with the opposition unnecessary. But his conduct also stemmedfrom a deep contempt for the deputies that was widespread in conser-vative circles. A few hours after the opening ceremonies at the WinterPalace, Count V. B. Frederiks, who occupied the powerful position of min-ister of the court, was quoted as having said: “The deputies? They giveone the impression of a gang of criminals who are only waiting for thesignal to throw themselves upon the Ministers and cut their throats.What wicked faces! I will never set foot among those people.” Accord-ing to S. F. Kryzhanovskii, an influential assistant minister of internal af-fairs, two-thirds of the peasant deputies were “completely untutored”and could act only on the basis of instinct, not reasoning. Moreover, the

government considered many of them to be debauched. Deputies,Kryzhanovskii recalled with considerable relish, regularly drank to excessat inns and then would become rowdy and unruly; when other citizenstried to calm them down, the troublemakers would claim that as legisla-tors they enjoyed immunity, giving them right to do as they pleased.Kryzhanovskii also claimed that a number of deputies conducted revolu-tionary propaganda in factories, organized street demonstrations, and in-cited crowds against the police. During one demonstration, the Ekateri-noslav deputy M. I. Mikhailichenko became involved in a brawl and wasbadly beaten by policemen. The next day he took part in an interpella-tion on this incident with his face so covered in bandages that only hisnose and eyes were visible. There is no reason to doubt the accuracy ofKryzhanovskii’s account of misbehavior by Duma deputies; a fair num-ber of them were uneducated and unruly. But most deputies were serious,though politically immature, and dedicated to the reform and renewal ofRussia. The point is that the men in authority who could not abide theidea of sharing power with any elected institution seized on the misdeedsof miscreants as yet another reason for ignoring the Duma.

The court and the government made a serious political mistake inviewing the Duma deputies as one undifferentiated mass, all of them, orvirtually all of them, committed to a revolutionary upheaval. In fact, onseveral occasions, the Kadets successfully reined in the more radical andvolatile Trudoviks. An astute and politically agile prime minister mighthave been able to exploit the differences between the two largest opposi-tional parties. But a crude posture of hostility toward the Duma suitedGoremykin’s temperament perfectly and fitted in with his notion of howthe government should be run. Not only did he not want the Duma tomeddle in affairs of state; he did not think that the Council of Ministersought to trouble itself about domestic or international affairs either. Heregularly held meetings of the cabinet, but “merely for the sake of form.”He presided in “a tired and absentminded fashion,” allowed each minis-ter to have his say so long as he was brief, and would announce, “in a fa-therly and polite tone,” that he would reach his own decisions, which heintended to submit to the tsar for final action. Gurko, who attended themeetings, recalled that Goremykin assumed “an air which seemed to say:‘Babble as you will, for I shall act as I see fit.’” If anyone dared to suggestthat the conflict between the government and the Duma might provokeunrest among the masses, Goremykin dismissed the warning as “child-ishness” and pointed out that the telegrams from the people printed inthe press proved that they strongly supported the tsar. However, theprime minister conducted the cabinet meetings in such a calm and good-natured way that no one was offended.

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Society was aware of the incompetence in the highest circles of theadministration. On June 6 a major newspaper, Russkie vedomosti, statedbluntly in an editorial that the government was once again in disarray.Official communications issued one day were retracted the next morning.Ministers constantly altered their decisions, moving from one course ofaction to another without explaining their changes. The paper saw onlyone way out of the morass, a replacement of the government by one thatenjoyed the confidence of the Duma.

The government, however, had reached a different conclusion. OnMay 14, one day after the Duma’s vote of no confidence, a large majorityin the Council of Ministers agreed that the legislature would have to bedissolved. The only question regarded timing. Goremykin apparently didnot reveal his own views on the subject. He merely asked that the delib-erations be kept confidential, and that all the ministers should be preparedfor an emergency. But news of the deliberations leaked out and for thenext few weeks newspapers carried numerous articles on the impendingdissolution and on a likely shakeup of the government. By early June, thecourt had in fact lost confidence in Goremykin and only a last-ditch effortby the tsar’s advisors to work out some sort of accord between the monar-chy and moderates in the Duma postponed a final decision on the Dumafor about a month. In both camps, many hesitated to initiate an ultimateconfrontation out of fear of the consequences of such a leap in the dark.

stirrings from below

The debates in the Duma proceeded against a background of unrest thaterupted in various regions of the empire, a rude reminder that the gov-ernment’s program of pacification was only partially effective. Seriousdisorders began early in May, and when they subsided in July, they hadleft their mark in the countryside, in several cities, and in the army. Theauthorities believed or perhaps simply hoped that the stirrings from be-low marked the last gasp of the revolution; for many leaders of the op-position, they appeared to be the start of a new upheaval that would un-dermine the foundations of the old order. Inevitably, the differentperceptions of the disturbances influenced the strategy of the contendingforces.

In scope and intent the agrarian unrest that began in May 1906 andlasted for three months was comparable to the turbulence in the coun-tryside during the last three months of 1905. Close to 1,600 episodes ofdisorder broke out in both periods, and the primary goal of the rebellious

peasants remained constant—to obtain more land. But there were signif-icant differences in the two waves of protest. The unrest of 1906 tendedto be less violent, although some looting and arson did take place. Mostnotably, only in 1906 did the peasant question become a central issue inthe unfolding of the revolution. The dramatic confrontations of the pre-vious year—Bloody Sunday, the general strike in October, the Decemberuprising in Moscow—and the political reforms, such as the OctoberManifesto, resulted from the actions of workers or liberals. This is not tosuggest that the agrarian unrest of 1905 was a minor event. It causedmuch consternation and frightened a sizable number of the landed gen-try, impelling them to turn to the right politically in the winter of 1905–6.But it was only in the spring of 1906 that the agrarian issue moved tocenter stage in the conflict between the government and the opposition.

The peasant movement was enormously complex, since the behaviorof peasants depended to a very large extent on local conditions. But a fewgeneralizations may be hazarded. The movement was most intense in theblack-earth regions of the central Russian provinces, where serfdom hadbeen most highly developed prior to 1861. The unrest was also intense inthe Baltic provinces, where the nobility of German extraction owned avast proportion of the arable land. But it would be a mistake to assumethat all the peasants in any specific locale joined in the disturbances: thelevel of participation in the more destructive actions ranged from 10 to50 percent and was probably higher in strikes by agricultural workers.Nor did the peasants who took part in the unrest necessarily agree on allthe measures to be taken to improve their lot. In the Gorodiansk Districtin Chernigov Province, for example, landless peasants and small land-holders collaborated in the unrest, but only so long as they were directedagainst “landlords or Jews.” But when the violence was directed at pros-perous peasants, ghastly conflicts occasionally broke out. “It was an in-expressibly horrible, wild, and repulsive scene,” according to one report.“People suspected of burning or destroying peasant farmsteads were im-mediately sentenced to death by their fellow villagers and were killed onthe spot by rifles or pickets or torn to pieces by pitchforks.”

Few issues have produced more conflicting claims than the role of rev-olutionaries, the rural intelligentsia, or local agitators in instigating thepeasant movement. Generally, observers unsympathetic to the unrestblamed outsiders; radicals, eager to take credit for the upheaval, madeexcessive claims about their influence in the villages. Thus, most gover-nors, late in 1905 contended that “revolutionary propaganda was themain cause of rural disturbances,” which is not surprising because theseofficials viewed peasants as naive children who were easily influenced byoutsiders. Also, the governors found it easier to repress revolutionarypropagandists than to put down large masses of rebellious peasants.

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Actually, there is considerable evidence that peasants took the initiativein launching unrest and showed increasing interest in organizing them-selves for both economic and political action without outside prompting.It was not uncommon for peasants to hold meetings in their villages to dis-cuss their grievances and the demands they wished to submit to the au-thorities. Quite often, peasants refused to pay taxes, and more often still,they joined unions formed in response to the appeals of the All-RussianPeasants’ Union, an organization that had been created in July and thatpushed a radical economic and political program. By the end of 1905, theunion had some 470 local branches, with an estimated membership of twohundred thousand, operating under twelve provincial committees andfour interprovincial committees. Its influence, however, is hard to discern.Part of the problem is that the government dealt harshly with the union’sleaders, many of whom were arrested in late 1905. In addition, the union’sopposition to participation in the election to the Duma cost it the supportof many peasants, who voted for nonpartisan candidates, subsequently thecore of the Trudovik fraction in the legislature.

The most dramatic form of political action by peasants was the cre-ation of local institutions of self-government, or “peasant republics.”There were not many such republics and they generally did not last morethan a few weeks, but they still merit some attention because they are anindication of the emerging politicization of the peasant movement andbecause they provide additional evidence of the tsarist regime’s loss of au-thority. They sprang up in various parts of the country, but the one mostfrequently mentioned by historians is the Markovo Republic inVolokalamsk District only one hundred miles from Moscow. This repub-lic seems to have lasted longer than most, from October 31, 1905, tillJuly 18, 1906. The information on it is rather meager. Apparently, it in-corporated six villages, and the local peasants refused to pay taxes andrents or report for army service. Generally, the republics came to an endas soon as army units appeared to repress them.

The immediate background to the upsurge of agrarian unrest in May1906 was another poor harvest, the second in a row. Because food re-serves were extremely low, a serious famine struck the Volga region—witha population of approximately twenty million—with particular ferocity,and without the emergency aid of the Red Cross and zemstvo activists avery large number of peasants would have perished. In the spring of 1906there was a new element in the situation in many parts of the country: dis-gruntled peasants in the villages had been reinforced by a new and angrygroup—soldiers who had returned from the battlefields in Manchuria.Numerous observers noted that the former soldiers now played a signifi-cant role in the unrest. These men were, of course, young people, a groupthat was regularly in the forefront of the peasant movement. Older people

were more cautious, but many sympathized with the activists and joinedthem in their forays. In Tula Province, even seventy-five-year-old womenwere noticed among the militants. Women, it is worth noting, generallyparticipated in large numbers, and occasionally they showed greater fer-vor than young people. Teachers, doctors’ assistants (feldshers), and evensextons also took part, as did workers in the cities who had returned totheir villages.

The convocation of the Duma served in various ways to stimulate un-rest in the countryside. For one thing, it aroused peasant interest in na-tional affairs. Before the Russo-Japanese War and the revolutionary eventsof 1905, relatively few newspapers reached the villages. By 1906, how-ever, newspapers and journals were available in 79 percent of them, andmany now regularly received two to three journals. Newspapers, more-over, would be passed from one person to another, and from one villageto another, and often literate villagers would read the papers to severalpeasants who were illiterate, usually at “political clubs” that met in vil-lage tearooms. Thus, despite the government’s attempts to reduce theflow of information, peasants were remarkably well informed about thedebates in the Duma, and although the Law of February 20, 1906, pro-hibited the sending of petitions to the legislature, villagers throughout thecountry bombarded deputies with cahiers. Some petitions had been sentto the capital by peasants in 1905, but the practice became widespreadonly 1906, when, it has been estimated, several thousand were receivedby officials in St. Petersburg.

The cahiers were often written by local intelligentsia, but there is littledoubt that the cahiers represented the views of the people, who wouldgather at meetings to give their approval to the documents, which pro-vide much accurate information on the mood and attitudes of the coun-tryside. By and large, the peasants placed great hopes in the Duma, cer-tain that it would meet their demands, the most numerous and urgent ofwhich was for land. The peasants also asked for political and social re-forms, but there were some differences among villagers on these issues.Not all the cahiers were grounded in humane and liberal principles.

It is worth describing at length two petitions from different parts ofthe country, for they reveal not only the peasants’ concerns but also theirdeep feelings of despair. The first, sent to the Duma on February 8, 1906,by the peasants and townsmen of Sviatii Krest, Stavropol Province, readas follows:

The land, like air, water, and sunshine is a gift of God, and no one may disposeof it at will or exploit it. God created the world and gave human beings full con-trol [of the land]; [but] God created neither nobles nor peasants; we are all God’schildren, and we have a right to demand our father’s inheritance, and God is the

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father of all of us. Are we peasants really only his stepsons, and the nobles hissons? This is gross injustice. Whoever works the land should have as much of it ashe and his family cultivate.

The second petition is striking because it demonstrates the peasants’hope that the Duma would promote their interests. Written on May 28,1906, by the peasants of the village of Vtory Birki, Kiev Province, thatpetition appealed

to you, deputies of Kiev Province who are unknown to us, to propose to you thatyou firmly defend the interests of the people, that you protect us from further ar-bitrary rule. Here in our country, we are not sure that tomorrow we will not beplundered and that our property will not be burned, we are not confident that to-morrow our wives and children will not be violated by ferocious Cossacks andtheir commanders. . . . We hear the moans of villages that are starving in 150 dis-tricts. We hear the weeping of fathers and children who have lost their kin. Ourhearts are lacerated from these moans and tears; we are in no condition to endurethis any longer. . . . We suggest that you join the Trudovik group and fight for aConstituent Assembly, for full freedom, for all the land. . . . We for our part willkeep an eye on your activities, and in case of need we will support you, even ifthis will cost us our lives.

Other cahiers were less emotional, but an overwhelming majority fo-cused on similar issues. A few urged the Duma not to grant amnesty topolitical prisoners and not to press for the elimination of the emergencylegislation or the State Council. These demands were in the resolutionadopted by a meeting of 840 people in Nogutsk (a village of nine hun-dred households), Stavropol Province, which also urged that “under nocircumstances” should Jews be given equal rights, “since these peopleseek to gain power over us; they wish to destroy the existing state systemin Russia and to arrange things so that Jews will govern Russia in placeof God’s anointed.” Moreover, “all non-Russians and persons of Jewishnationality who have been converted from Judaism to our faith” shouldbe excluded from the State Duma. The bureaucracy and the military serv-ices “should be composed of Orthodox Russian men—not foreigners, ornon-Orthodox people, or people of Jewish origin who converted toChristianity, or of Poles.” Yet, inexplicably, the petition from Nogutskended with a request that contradicted these prejudices: “Publish a lawon the equality of all citizens.”

Two further generalizations about the extensive peasant participationin the cahiers campaign are noteworthy. In the first place, the intelli-gentsia’s role in drafting the petitions produced a change, even if on amodest scale, in the relations between the villagers and outsiders. The po-litical and cultural isolation of the countryside, deeply rooted in Russianhistory, began to break down. Second, the peasants’ attitude toward their

ruler had visibly changed. In composing their petitions in 1905, the peas-ants had tended to pour out their hearts to their Little Father and to askhim to redress their grievances. Now, a year later, the Duma had emergedas a new center of political power and the politicization of the peasantryhad produced a distinctly different attitude: many villagers were nolonger content to rest their hopes for “land and liberty” or for the satis-faction of other demands on the magnanimity of the tsar; they had de-cided to appeal to their representatives to take control of affairs and todo their bidding.

Some Duma representatives regularly visited the countryside and didtheir best to heighten the peasants’ political awareness. On occasion theywent so far as to encourage them to engage in armed actions against theauthorities. This only reinforced the conviction of officials at all levels ofgovernment that the Duma was determined to drive the masses towardviolence.

To be sure, there was less destruction and burning of landlords’ es-tates, which had been a distinctive feature of the unrest in 1905. Now, in1906, peasants focused more on such actions as carting off of hay, illegalfelling of timber, unlawful grazing on meadows, and the refusal to paytaxes. In addition, a major form of unrest in 1906 was the agriculturalstrike, a weapon whose effective use requires a considerable degree of re-straint, political sophistication, and organization. Apparently, peasantsresorted to strikes in 1906 to avoid the severe repression they had en-dured in the late 1905. Fearful that the new weapon would pose a “seri-ous danger” to the national economy, the Council of Ministers on April17, 1906, issued “Regulations Against the Rise of Strikes by AgriculturalWorkers.” Anyone instigating a strike would be subject to imprisonmentfor a period ranging from six months to one year; anyone guilty of dam-aging property during a strike would face imprisonment for three to sixmonths; and anyone who took the initiative in organizing agriculturalworkers for collective action would be subject to a prison term rangingfrom sixteen months to four years. These were harsh measures, but theirdeterrent effect was slight.

There are no statistics on the total number of agricultural workerswho participated in strikes—for a shorter workday, raises in pay, reduc-tion of rents, and sometimes also for the removal of the Goremkin gov-ernment—but the seriousness of the form of unrest is beyond dispute. InBelorussia, for instance, work stoppages in the villages, easily the singlemost frequent form of disorder, accounted for close to one-fourth of allthe unrest in the spring of 1906. In midsummer, the government warnedlocal officials that although such “acts of violence” were initially inspiredby economic considerations, they “quickly assumed a social characterand cannot be tolerated,” lest “order and calm” be undermined. People

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on strike should be prosecuted, and strike leaders quickly exiled. “Inevery case, suppress [strikes] at the very beginning so as to keep themfrom developing and eliminate the possibility of their being repeated.”

Applying the same repressive measure it had used so effectively in1905 was not an option for the government. Soldiers and policemencould stop peasants from looting, but it was much more difficult for themto force peasants to work. The events in the village of Turii in southwestRussia are a case in point. After a strike that lasted three weeks, the au-thorities summoned a squadron of Ingush soldiers, who immediately ar-rested strikers and beat them mercilessly. But still no one went to workand the village came to a standstill. To escape the beatings, many peas-ants fled to the woods. When the managers of the estates realized that theuse of soldiers did not work, they accepted the conditions of the workersand the strike ended. In a fair number of regions, agricultural strikesended peacefully, and it was not uncommon for workers in the villages toscore at least partial victories.

By midsummer of 1906, the second wave of the peasant movementhad pretty much run its course, though this does not mean that the peas-ants were now content. Indeed, isolated disturbances broke out in thesecond half of that year and flared up again in the spring and summer of1907, but in fury, intensity, and scope these incidents did not approachthe turbulence of the two previous waves of agrarian turbulence.

industrial unrest

The industrial proletariat, which had been a critical force in the protestmovement during the last three months of 1905, played a secondary,though not insignificant, role in 1906. The strike movement declined inthe face of government repression, economic privation, and sheer ex-haustion. From a high of well over two million people on strike in Octo-ber 1905, the movement by February and March had declined to roughly27,000 and 51,000 respectively.1 In April 1906, the number of strikers inindustrial establishments rose to 220,000 and the figure stayed high forthe next three months: 157,000; 101,000; and 169,000. According toone scholar, workers emphasized political demands in over 40 percent ofthe strikes during the months from May through August, and economicdemands in the rest, a clear indication that the spirit of activism amongurban worker had not been extinguished in 1906.

Although workers initially disdained the Duma and many refused toparticipate in the elections, once it had assembled, they tended to take a

1. This figure included a good many white-collar employees.

more favorable view of it. Meetings of workers in numerous towns andcities sent messages to deputies urging them to adopt measures for theimprovement of working conditions. At the Fourth (Unification) Con-gress of the Russian Social Democratic Party in Stockholm in April 1906,even Lenin indicated a shift of attitude toward the Duma, and fivemonths later he came out for participation in future elections on theground that the Duma could be useful, not as a legislative body but as aplatform for Social Democratic agitation.

Workers quickly took advantage of the law of March 4 on tradeunions that, for all its limitations, legalized a range of union activitiesand thus enabled workers to channel their energies—previously devotedlargely to protest—into organizational work to an extent unknown inRussia. During the next fifteen months fifty-nine unions were legallyrecognized in St. Petersburg, and another seventeen remained unregis-tered; in Moscow, sixty-four were officially sanctioned, and eleven re-mained unregistered. The forty-two unions in the capital on which fig-ures are available attained a peak total membership of fifty-fivethousand; in Moscow the high (also for forty-two unions) was fifty-twothousand. True, the movement incorporated only a small share of theworkforce—9 percent in St. Petersburg, and 10 percent in Moscow—but these are nevertheless impressive statistics; in Germany in 1907 onlyabout 22 percent of all industrial laborers belonged to unions. In theRussian Empire as a whole in 1907, the membership of the 273 regis-tered unions came to over one hundred six thousand. There is no hardinformation on the size of the remaining 631 unions, but it is likely thatby early 1907 the membership of all the unions exceeded three hundredthousand.

Even though unions continued to be harassed in myriad ways—searches, confiscations, prohibitions of meetings, and arrests of officerswere common—they made distinct progress in defending worker interestsin collective negotiations with employers. They also became important ascultural institutions: they organized lectures, concerts, and meetings todiscuss issues of concern to the rank and file. Many unions establishedtheir own libraries and reading rooms, and quite a few published news-papers. The aim of union officials, a large number of whom were SocialDemocrats or Socialist Revolutionaries (at least in the two largest citiesof the empire), was to instill a sense of class solidarity in the workers andto reduce the likelihood of their acting on whim.

On one issue that affected workers with special force in 1906—unem-ployment—they exhibited a notable degree of activism: they launched thefirst campaign ever in Russia to secure relief from the authorities. Therapid rise of unemployment was pervasive in the cities in 1906. The pre-cise numbers are in dispute: the highest estimate for St. Petersburg is forty

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thousand, the lowest fifteen thousand. The estimates for Moscow rangefrom twenty to twenty-three thousand; in Odessa more than twelve thou-sand were without work. Statistics for other cities are hard to come by,but there is no doubt that the number of unemployed had risen sharplyin many of them. The estimate of the total number without work in theentire empire ranges from one hundred twenty-nine thousand to threehundred thousand—out of a total industrial force of at most three mil-lion. Because of widespread famine in the countryside, a return to the vil-lages was for many of the unemployed not a realistic option.

A recession and the addition to the labor market of soldiers returningfrom the Far East were primary causes of unemployment, but there wasanother factor: the dismissal of many workers for having taken part inpolitical strikes or for participating in political activities generally. What-ever the reason, the plight of the unemployed was dreadful. Many ofthem went hungry and turned to begging, as it became increasingly diffi-cult to obtain food on credit. And the canteens, supported by unions, pri-vate charities, and contributions from city councils or zemstvos, couldnot cope with the growing number of indigent people who appeared forfree meals. The authorities in the capital showed little sympathy and of-ten treated the unemployed contemptuously, as potential troublemakers.

Anarchists and terrorists tried to enroll the unemployed into theirmovements, but despite the widespread despair their success was verylimited. Most men without jobs preferred to place their hopes in moreconstructive action, which began to take shape in early 1906 at the vari-ous canteens in the capital—twenty-four in all—that provided free din-ners to more than nine thousand people. During mealtime, informalmeetings would be held to discuss actions that might be taken to dealwith the crisis. Two ideas emerged—to form a soviet of the unemployed,and to ask the City Council to set up a public-works program—but noone knew how to proceed. An item in the daily press provided an open-ing for an approach to the St. Petersburg City Council. The newspapersreported that the council had voted to award a contract worth severalmillion rubles to the Westinghouse Company to build an electrical tramsystem for St. Petersburg. Industrialists were outraged that such a lucra-tive contract had been awarded to foreigners, and many unemployedworkers at the canteens contended that if that much money was avail-able, it should be used to create jobs for them.

After several meetings, men and women at some canteens elected rep-resentatives to a “Soviet of the Unemployed” to apply pressure on localofficials in their behalf. The soviet wasted no time in drafting a petitionfor submission to the City Council. “We are not asking for charity,” thepetition stated, “but for our rights, and we will not be satisfied withcrumbs. The public works that we demand should begin immediately. All

unemployed in Petersburg should be given work. Everyone must receiveadequate pay.” If the demands were not met, the petition continued, thepeople themselves would appear at the City Council to press their case.The soviet then distributed ten thousand copies of the petition to drumup support; both unemployed and employed workers responded enthusi-astically. More extensive and more formal elections for delegates to thesoviet were now held; workers with jobs chose one delegate for every fivehundred employees at their factories, and the jobless chose one for everyone hundred fifty of their number. Between ninety and one hundred thou-sand participated in the elections.

On March 28 a delegation from the soviet of fifteen people appearedat the building of the City Council to lobby for the petition, and it suc-ceeded quickly in securing a meeting with members of the council, inlarge part because the plight of the unemployed had gained considerablepublicity in newspapers and sympathy from middle-class groups as wellas from several Kadets alarmed at the large number of people withoutjobs. Before the meeting, the City Council decided in executive session toadopt a conciliatory stance. After the soviet’s delegates outlined their de-mands in rather strong, even provocative, language, the spokesperson forthe council announced that the city soon expected to employ four to fivethousand people to construct and repair canals, bridges, and the harbor.Moreover, shortly after the meeting, the City Council unanimously votedto form a commission, to include some workers’ representatives, and toimplement a public-works program. It assigned five hundred thousandrubles to the program and allocated additional funds for public relief.During the next few weeks, endless conflicts arose over who qualified forjobs and relief, but by mid-July some public-works programs began tooperate, though not on the scale demanded by the Soviet of the Unem-ployed. By October close to four thousand people had obtained work. Inaddition, the City Council provided funds that enabled the soviet to ad-minister a total of thirty-two canteens, at which more than sixteen thou-sand people were given free meals each day. Furthermore, rent subsidieswere given to several thousand families; in all, about thirty-six thousandpeople benefited from the council’s aid. In the fall of 1906, however, theprogram declined precipitately, in large measure because of a drift to theright by the authorities, who approved ever smaller amounts of money forpublic works and aid to the needy. To make matters worse, bitter quarrelsbetween leaders of the soviet over the mishandling or misappropriation offunds weakened the organization, which continued to function until late1907 but was never again as influential as in the spring of 1906.

Organized movements of unemployed workers made their appearancein at least ten other cities, including Moscow, Kharkov, Tiflis, Baku, and

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Saratov, and each made demands similar to those of the Soviet of the Un-employed in the capital. Invariably, city councils pleaded insolvency anddelayed as long as possible before granting any aid to the indigent. Still,in Moscow, Tiflis, and Saratov and in a few other cities modest public-works programs were established, and some help was given to canteensto provide free meals to the unemployed.

lawlessness

General lawlessness—political terrorism, ordinary criminality, and right-wing hooliganism—remained at a high pitch in the spring and summer of1906. Hardly a day passed without a newspaper report on the murder ofa policeman, senior official, or innocent citizen. In such an atmosphere ofhatred, incitement to murder, and official tolerance of lawlessness, an ex-plosion of mass violence was almost inevitable. The explosion erupted onJune 1 in the form of an anti-Jewish pogrom in Bialystok, a city of aboutforty-four thousand Jews and twenty-one thousand gentiles in GrodnoProvince, probably the single most ghastly incident of ethnic violence todate. Eighty-eight people were killed (six of them non-Jews) and aboutseven hundred were wounded, and 169 shops and houses were plun-dered, among them the largest stores in the city. Duma deputies, stunnedby the initial reports from the city, immediately formed a committee toinvestigate the incident.

It turned out that the violence broke out during a religious processionof Catholics and Orthodox, the former to celebrate Corpus Christi andthe latter to mark the founding of the Orthodox cathedral. Suddenly, re-volver shots were heard and shouts resounded: “Beat the Jews!” Themelee began immediately and spread quickly: “First of all,” one newspa-per reported, “the thugs flung themselves at Jewish hardware and armorystores, pillaged them, beat everyone with axes, crowbars, [and] slabs ofiron, and right away set out for the jewelry stores.” On one street, “theyentered and pillaged virtually all the stores and private homes.” Not asingle policeman could be seen, and all the soldiers who had a few min-utes earlier filled the streets had vanished. Members of the Jewish self-de-fense units with revolvers and knives in their hands moved against thethugs, initiating a struggle “for life and death.” At this point dragoonsappeared and fired ten to fifteen shots at Jews. “The entire city lookedlike a battlefield.” The carnage continued for three days, though the firstday was by far the most violent.

On the third day of violence the minister of internal affairs Stolypin

sent a telegram to all governors and city governors reminding them oftheir duty to suppress pogroms, whether directed at landlords or at Jews.Inaction or official connivance with the marauders, he warned, wouldhave the “most serious consequences.” By then Bialystok had been placedunder martial law, and substantial military reinforcements had been sentto the city to maintain order.

Newspapers now began to carry articles indicating that local officialsand respected citizens in Bialystok had either inflamed the populationagainst the Jews or actually participated in the looting. And the senior of-ficial from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, E. V. Frish, who had been sentto Bialystok to conduct an investigation, confirmed that administratorsand soldiers had indeed taken part in the rampage. Outraged by thisnews, the Duma devoted several sessions to the events in Bialystok, andthe deliberations were among the stormiest in the history of the legisla-ture. On June 8, Stolypin himself felt compelled to present the govern-ment’s views on the pogrom. He assured the deputies that he would nottolerate illegal violence of any kind, and he conceded that mistakes hadbeen by officials and policemen, who, he noted insensitively, had been thetarget of many terrorist attacks. The deputies were not impressed and in-terrupted the minister with shouts of “Enough!” and with so much noisethat at one point the president called for order in the chamber.

The most dramatic point in the debate was the appearance of PrinceS. D. Urusov, assistant minister of internal affairs for a few months inlate 1905 and early 1906 and now a deputy who belonged to the mod-erately liberal Party of Democratic Reform. Urusov, who spoke fromfirsthand experience, asserted flatly that senior officials, though not nec-essarily the government itself, played a decisive role in fomentingpogroms throughout 1905 and in the early months of 1906. He went sofar as to describe the pattern of the outbreaks, which buttressed his con-tention that they were the work of “some kind of uniform and widelyplanned organization.” Then he referred to the revelation that had cometo light the previous February, that a certain Captain M. S. Kommisarovhad been in charge of a printing press, located in an out-of-the-wayroom in the Department of Police in St. Petersburg, that had been usedto produce anti-Jewish proclamations. When someone stumbled on thepress and asked Kommisarov what kind of work he did, he replied: “Wecan arrange any massacre you like; a massacre of ten or a massacre often thousand.” Urusov warned that even a government responsible tothe Duma could not prevent outbreaks of mass violence unless it purgedthe entire administration of the “dark forces” that would stop at nothingto maintain the old order. “Herein lies a great danger, and this danger willnot disappear so long as in the direction of affairs and in the fortunes of

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our country we continue to feel the influence of men who have the educa-tion of policemen and sergeants, and are pogromshchiki on principle.”

Urusov’s speech was received with “endless and thunderous applause”and, according to one observer, “had a greater effect than any other inthe First Duma.” The Kadets introduced a resolution, adopted on July 7,demanding that everyone responsible for the violence in Bialystok bebrought to justice and that the government resign. The government ig-nored the second part of the resolution and took two years before pre-ferring charges against thirty-six rioters in Bialystok. Several of the ac-cused failed to show up in court, and fifteen were acquitted. Of the rest,one received a jail sentence of three years, and thirteen were handedlighter jail sentences, ranging from six months to one year.

For about three months in 1906 it seemed as though the authoritiesmight confront a series of challenges within the military services compa-rable to those it had faced in the fall of 1905. There were twenty-fourmutinies in May, eighty-four in June, and forty-one in July. Apparently,the deliberations in the Duma had an effect on many soldiers and sailorssimilar to that of the promulgation of the October Manifesto. Just as theManifesto appeared to signal a collapse of the old order, so the actions ofthe Duma seemed to suggest that the government was incapable ofquelling political challenges to its authority. Under the circumstances,men in uniform assumed that the military authorities too could be defiedwith impunity.

Moreover, there was evidence of mounting revolutionary propagandain the army and navy in the first six months of 1906. At least seventy-twoSocial Democratic and forty-five Socialist Revolutionary military organi-zations were active in early summer. Somewhere between one thousandand thirteen hundred civilians worked in these organizations, distribut-ing leaflets and conducting discussions of political issues. They publishedthirty newspapers addressed specifically to soldiers. It has been estimatedthat at least twenty thousand and perhaps as many as thirty thousandmen in uniform belonged to military organizations under the control ofone or another revolutionary movement. Although the unrest in the mil-itary was not as extensive as in 1905, in one respect it was more trouble-some for the authorities: the uniformed men who now joined the protestmovement tended to place greater emphasis on political issues.

The minister of internal affairs, Stolypin, sent frequent and alarmingreports to General Rediger on the success of revolutionary agitators.Rediger himself, it was rumored at the time, warned the tsar that becauseof the ferment in the army it might be unsafe to use soldiers to dissolve

the Duma, should that become necessary. Indeed, many soldiers closelyfollowed the debates in the Duma and sent messages of support to thedeputies. “Do your work, for which you were sent by our fathers,” menin the Vladikavkaz garrison told the deputies in late May: “Obtain every-thing that our fathers have bid you—may Providence aid you in this—and we, their sons, will endeavor here not to allow into our weak headsthe shameful thoughts the government is developing.”

In the 149 mutinies that broke out between May and July, political de-mands figured prominently in at least 43, though very few involved vio-lence. Among other things, the men demanded an end to the use oftroops in police actions, the granting of freedom of assembly to civiliansand soldiers, and the “implementation of all demands brought forth bythe State Duma.” As in 1905, the mutineers called for improvements intheir conditions—they wanted higher pay and better food, better cloth-ing and medical treatment, and free transportation while on leave, tomention only a few. Rediger did his best to isolate the military men fromagitators and in June he ordered army officers to reduce as much as pos-sible the number of soldiers used in the suppression of civilian unrest. Inthis regard, the civilian and military authorities faced a dilemma. Theyknew that assigning the army to police duties was undermining moraleamong the troops and that this could eventually pose a threat to the state.Nevertheless, the disturbances in the countryside and the unrest in thecities posed an immediate threat to the prevailing system of rule. True,the government might have enlarged the police forces, but the army wasboth a cheaper and a more efficient tool. A soldier was paid between sixand twelve rubles a year, compared to two hundred to three hundredsixty earned by policeman. Moreover, a young, well-trained, and well-armed soldier was more effective in crushing rural and urban unrest thana middle-aged policeman, who was usually supplied with outdatedweapons.

As it turned out, the authorities in 1906 had no reason to questiontheir decision to rely primarily on the army to quash disorder. The unrestin the army in June 1906 was serious, and it became even more serious inthe month of July, but it did not undermine the tsarist regime. The mu-tinies were for the most part isolated incidents, and the mutineers failedto establish links with each other or with rebellious peasants and workers.At no time did a national leadership emerge that could provide directionto the protest movement in the army. Moreover, a substantial majority ofsoldiers remained loyal to tsarism in the sense that they obeyed orders toput down the few armed mutinies that occurred, and that was crucial inenabling the old order to weather the storm in the spring and summer of1906.

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dissolution of the first duma

Throughout June and during the first week of July the political leadershipof the country—at the court as well as within the government and in theDuma—was paralyzed. The authorities undertook very few legislativeinitiatives, and the Duma accomplished virtually nothing of importance.The temptation in official circles to deliver a decisive blow against theDuma was strong, but in view of the widespread unrest, the court de-cided on a more prudent course, to wait and see if some accommodationcould be reached with the opposition.

The Duma’s ineffectiveness cannot be ascribed to indolence. Duringthe seventy-two days of its existence, it held forty sessions, most of themlasting at least five hours. The Stenographic Reports on its deliberationsruns to more than two thousand pages. In addition, many deputies spentlong hours at meetings of special committees discussing drafts of legisla-tive proposals. And when deputies were not formally engaged in legisla-tive work, they could be seen huddled in corridors debating tactics andevaluating the latest rumors about the next moves of the authorities. Fre-quently, party leaders met late into the night to map out strategy, andparty fractions met regularly to decide how to vote on particular meas-ures. Yet, the Duma’s record of achievement was negligible. Of thetwenty-nine legislative proposals introduced in the chamber, only twowere ultimately approved, and only one of those actually became law. Itsgreatest success was to vote fifteen million rubles for relief for many thou-sands of citizens who faced a devastating famine, and in this instanceboth the State Council and the tsar gave their approval. Of the remainingtwenty-seven proposals, not one was reported out of committee. Of thevarious bills submitted by the government, only one was discussed by theDuma. The rest were not even placed on the agenda. The Duma simplynoted the receipt of the bills and then took no further action.

But the Duma did make extensive use of its authority to summon min-isters or heads of departments to the chamber for questioning about alle-gations of illegal actions and abuses of power by officials. All told, morethan four hundred such summonses, known as interpellations, werepassed by the chamber, which comes to almost six a day. Virtually all ofthem touched on highly charged issues, and although the interpellationsdid not lead to legislation, they did give deputies an opportunity to attackthe government where it was most vulnerable and to demonstrate theirdetermination to defend the civil rights of the people.

In the end, however, Goremykin’s government came to grief over theagrarian question. Still, it would be a mistake to dismiss the debates over

other issues—amnesty, capital punishment, the emergency regulations,and, above all, ministerial responsibility—as merely a cover for the onlysignificant struggle, the struggle over the disposition of the nobility’s land.An overwhelming majority of the deputies felt deeply about civil libertiesand human rights, as is clear from the passionate and frequent debates onthese topics. Moreover, it is arguable that the Kadets placed greaterweight on transforming the legislature into a body with sovereign pow-ers than on instituting specific reforms, including agrarian reforms. In anycase, for the Kadets the achievement of such a transformation was inti-mately linked with the achievement of economic and social reforms. Onewould inevitably lead to the other. By the same token, there is little evi-dence to suggest that Tsar Nicholas and his senior advisers were any lessconcerned about retaining the upper hand politically than they wereabout protecting the property rights of the nobility. There is no reason toassume that if the Duma and the government had feuded only over polit-ical power and human rights, the conflict between them would have beenmarkedly less acrid.

Nonetheless, the Duma did devote far more time to the agrarian issuethan to any other, and conflict over it was the immediate cause of the fi-nal rupture between the tsarist authorities and the legislature. The pro-ceedings were extremely complicated, in part because the agrarian ques-tion was highly complex, and in part because several projects wereintroduced, none of them enjoying the support of a majority of thedeputies. For the purposes of this study, it will suffice to consider onlysome of the major proposals.

The central premise of the Kadet proposal was to provide land for thelandless and to increase the allotments of “land-starved peasants.” Thiswas to be accomplished by distributing state udel (holdings of the impe-rial family), cabinet (private imperial property), and monastic and churchland, as well as privately owned land, which was to be confiscated “atstate expense, to the extent necessary, with compensation of the presentowners at just price.” But some lands were to be exempt: for example, es-tates that possessed a “generally useful significance” and public landsthat served a “social, sanitary, [or] educational” purpose. The Trudoviksintroduced a “Land Socialization Bill” that stipulated that ultimately allland (including its minerals and waters) was to be handed over to thepeople, but only to those who worked the land with their own labor. TheTrudoviks differed among themselves over the questions of compensationto landowners and in the end settled on a compromise, according towhich the state, not the peasants, would compensate the owners, whowould be deprived of all land that they could not farm on their own.

On May 19, the government reiterated its opposition to compulsory

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expropriation, which it claimed would be harmful to the nation’s econ-omy. In an address to the Duma, the deputy minister of internal affairs,Gurko, argued that of the total amount of land available in EuropeanRussia, some 318 million desiatinas, only 43 million could be expropri-ated because the rest was already being cultivated by peasants or ownedby them, or was in provinces where agriculture did not thrive. In fact,Gurko argued, it was likely that if the 43 million desiatinas of land wereexpropriated, the peasants’ lot would worsen since such a drastic changein landownership would “undermine the most solvent forces in the coun-try,” the large landowners. Moreover, the low productivity of the peas-ants on the expropriated land would result in a reduction of the purchas-ing power of the country at large and thus would have the consequenceof severely harming industry. Although Gurko’s arguments were deliv-ered in strident language, they were not entirely without merit. But hewas known as a dogmatic reactionary and the deputies took delight ingreeting his comments with shouts of “Resign! Resign!” Gurko had hisrevenge at the start of another appearance in the Duma by telling a min-ister sitting next to him in a voice loud enough so that several deputiescould hear him, “Let us listen to the ravings of these hooligans.”

On June 20, the authorities went over the heads of the deputies by is-suing a declaration assuring the peasants that the tsar and his officialswere deeply concerned for their well-being and that they intended to im-prove their conditions, but they also stated categorically that they wouldnot do so by alienating privately owned lands. Instead, the governmentwould buy land from private owners and make it available for purchaseby peasants with the help of the Peasants’ Land Bank, which was admin-istered by the government. The government would also facilitate peasantmigration to regions where land was readily available and give adviceand help to peasants to improve their productivity.

As the angry deputies were preparing a response to the declaration, thecourt acted as though a peaceful resolution of the conflict between thegovernment and the Duma might be possible. It indicated willingness toconsider the formation of a new government acceptable to the opposi-tion. It was assumed at the time that the court took this action because ithad concluded that the legislature could not be dissolved “without risk-ing an enormous convulsion.” Whatever the reason, for about two weekssenior officials at court and several ministers were engaged in feverish ne-gotiations with liberals and Octobrists about the appointment of a newministry. The result was a deluge of clandestine meetings and rumors, im-plausible assertions, and misunderstandings by officials and liberals, notto mention the endless behind-the-scenes intrigues. To what extent thetsar was informed about these maneuvers and gave his approval to the

quest for an accord with the liberals is not clear. There is no doubt that heknew about some of the negotiations, and it is certain that he himself en-tered into a discussion with one leading member of the Union of October17. Most likely, the tsar encouraged the negotiations to see where theywould lead. Subjected to a barrage of contradictory advice, unable tochoose among alternate policies, Nicholas probably decided to exhaustall possibilities. At the very least, he would be able to delay a final deci-sion on how to deal with the Duma. Shilly-shallying on the issue was cer-tainly in keeping with this conduct of affairs of state.

In the end, after the involvement of such major figures as the tsar him-self, Miliukov, D. F. Trepov, Stolypin, Ermolov, Shipov, Muromtsev, andIzvolskii, the negotiations came to naught. The differences over such fun-damental issues as the powers of the Duma, amnesty for political prison-ers, and the expropriation of private property were simply too great.That the chasm between the tsar and Duma was also unbridgeable be-came clear beyond any question when the Duma, late in June, resumeddebate of the agrarian question. The deputies drafted an “Appeal to thePeople,” which amounted to an attempt to bypass the government. Aftercharging the authorities with having undermined “the faith of the peoplein a solution of the agrarian question by legislative means,” the appealassured the people that the Duma was working on an agrarian proposalcalling for some expropriation of private property. The appeal endedwith a statement that on the surface appeared to be moderate but struckthe authorities as a veiled incitement to unrest: “The State Duma hopesthat the population will calmly and peacefully await the completion ofthe work on the promulgation of such a law.” The implication seemed tobe that if the Duma’s measure did not become law, the people need nolonger restrain themselves. The comments of several deputies confirmedthat this was a correct reading of the appeal.

The appeal passed in the Duma by a vote of 124 to 53; 101 deputiesabstained and many others remained outside the hall during the vote be-cause they considered the statement insufficiently militant. Since a meas-ure had legal standing only if it received at least 164 votes, the govern-ment could not legitimately claim that the appeal had actually beenadopted. But this was beside the point for Goremykin and Stolypin, whonow advised the tsar to dissolve the legislature. Nicholas agreed and alsoagreed with Goremykin’s recommendation that he step aside as primeminister, to be succeeded by Stolypin.

The authorities took elaborate measures to prevent resistance to thedissolution. The ministers were directed to go about their business asusual so as to deflect any suspicion. And to further lull suspicions,Stolypin informed Muromtsev that he would appear at the Duma on July

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10 to respond to the interpellation on the Bialystok pogrom. Then, whenMuromtsev at the urging of his colleagues requested an audience with thetsar to head off dissolution, the prime minister informed him that hewould be received at the Winter Palace on July 9.

Astonishingly, the deceptions worked despite the fact that the prepa-rations undertaken by the government were extensive and little dis-guised. On July 8 fresh troops from various cities arrived in the capital,raising the number to twenty-two thousand. The railway stations wereoccupied by armed guards, and on July 7 a patrol boat and a cruisercould be seen on the Neva. On the same day, the police in St. Petersburgbegan to close down radical newspapers and to arrest leading Social De-mocrats and Socialist Revolutionaries.

Early Sunday morning of July 9 policemen and soldiers surroundedthe Tauride Palace with instructions not to permit anyone to enter thebuilding, not even to pick up personal belongings. At the same time, thegovernment distributed two documents throughout St. Petersburg: aukase ordering the dissolution and setting February 20 as the date forconvoking a new Duma as well as a manifesto explaining the action. St.Petersburg was placed under Extraordinary Security, which meant thatanyone offering resistance to the authorities would be subject to trial bya military court. The city governor of St. Petersburg prohibited all meet-ings, processions, displays of flags, and public singing, as well as the dis-tribution of unauthorized appeals or proclamations. To a British corre-spondent, it seemed as though “the palmy days of autocracy have beenrevived.”

The deputies were in a quandary. They could not prevent the closing ofthe legislature, and, in fact, several of them (including Miliukov) even ac-knowledged that the government was within its rights in dissolving it.Nonetheless, some militant response seemed to be called for, and after ag-onizing for a few hours the Kadet leadership summoned a meeting of leg-islators in Vyborg, Finland, where the Russian police had no jurisdictionand where the local authorities tended to be less repressive. At about9:00 pm of the day of dissolution 185 deputies, slightly more than one-third of the chamber’s total membership, arrived at the Hotel Belvedere, asecond-class provincial hotel. After hours of rancorous debate, thedeputies adopted a manifesto entitled “To the People from the People’sRepresentatives,” which denounced the government’s action and called oncitizens to offer passive resistance by refusing to pay taxes or to serve inthe military. “No force,” the manifesto predicted, “can withstand theunited and unwavering will of the people.” It was a militant call to action.True, the rump Duma did not advocate an armed uprising, as the soviethad done eight months earlier, but the Vyborg Manifesto was nevertheless

a radical step in that it urged the people to defy the law and to oppose anofficial action that could not be regarded as illegal.

It was in several respects an ill-considered move. Although the opposi-tion succeeded in quickly distributing the manifesto, there were no large-scale protests or widespread civil disobedience and only a few publicprotests. Exhausted from a year and a half of turbulence, confronted inthe cities with the threat of unemployment, the masses in 1906 weremuch more reluctant than they had been in 1905 to defy the authorities.Moreover, an effective campaign of passive resistance requires extensivepreparation and organization. Surprisingly, the Kadets did not seem to re-alize this, for they had done virtually nothing to prepare the ground foran organized response to the dissolution. They simply assumed that themasses were still in a militant and activist mood.

Less than a week after the meeting in Vyborg, the Kadets themselves ineffect conceded that they had misjudged the national mood and began toback away from the manifesto. On July 15 the central committee met atMiliukov’s dacha in Terioki and voted not to adopt the manifesto as offi-cial policy and not to continue distributing it to the population. Then, at aseries of “more or less conspiratorial” meetings of party activists it becameever more evident to the Kadet leaders that the masses were not preparedto engage in passive resistance on a large scale. One activist after anotherspoke evasively about the attitude of the peasants in their regions or statedcategorically that the people showed no interest in openly opposing the au-thorities. According to Miliukov, the party had no choice but to abandonthe tactic adopted at Vyborg. But a formal renunciation of the tactic wasembarrassing. The Kadets extricated themselves from the dilemma by an-nouncing that the Vyborg Manifesto was legitimate under the conditionsprevailing immediately after the dissolution and that if no new electionswere held the tactic of passive resistance would be implemented.

Not surprisingly, the conservatives welcomed the news of the dissolu-tion and gloated in unseemly fashion. The lead article of Moskovskie ve-domosti, a reactionary paper, on July 11 was captioned GOOD NEWS,and the first lines read as follows:

There is no Duma!The Duma no longer exists!The two-month disgrace that has burdened Russia has ended!

Another article on the same page began with the words: “The seditiousDuma remained seditious to the end.” The Monarchist Party in numerouscities sent telegrams to the tsar congratulating him and expressing thehope that the electoral law would be revised to ensure the election of amore trustworthy Duma.

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The liberal press went to the other extreme, arguing first that the dis-solution would eventually unleash a new wave of disturbances, and sec-ond that the people had serious doubts about the government’s promisethat a new Duma would actually be elected. In fact, the new prime min-ister, though a conservative who was infuriated by the Vyborg Manifesto,had no intention of calling off the elections.

chapter 7

A New Government Takes Command

When Stolypin arrived in St. Petersburg in April 1906 to join Gore-mykin’s cabinet as minister of internal affairs, no one expected him toemerge as the leader of the government, as the most resonant voice of theold order and as one of the most imposing statesmen of imperial Russia.Although he had occupied important positions in the bureaucracy as amarshal of the nobility and governor of Grodno and Saratov, he hadnever served in the capital, and he knew little about the workings of thecentral administration. By all accounts, during the first weeks of his resi-dence in the capital, he maintained a low profile and rarely took part inthe cabinet’s deliberations. No one could be sure whether he was timid orsimply reluctant to speak out until he felt sure of his ground.

Stolypin began to come into his own early in June with his firstspeeches in the Duma. He proved to be a man with strong convictionsand a clear vision for Russia’s future, a leader who did not fear to con-front directly anyone who challenged his views or authority. He was alsoan outstanding orator with a ringing voice that could be heard in the leg-islature despite the frequent shouts and hissing. A talented phrasemaker,he seemed to enjoy tangling with the obstreperous Duma deputies. But inhis personal dealings with individuals, he always gave the impression ofbeing sincere and thus inspired “confidence and even affection.”

Because of his eclectic views and policies, Stolypin evoked the most di-vergent assessments. Liberals and radicals dismissed him as an arch-reac-tionary, whereas most conservatives viewed him as a farsighted progres-sive, the only leader capable of extricating Russia from the morass. Sincethe late 1980s, Stolypin’s standing in Russia has soared because many be-lieve that had his policies been implemented Russia would have avoidedthe agonies of Bolshevism. None of these assessments by itself quite cap-tures the man, for he was a rather complicated person. He was essentiallya man of action whose views on society were based not on wide reading

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or commitment to one ideological position but on practical knowledge hehad acquired from his experiences as a public servant.

In some respects, the acclaim he received in late 1906 as Russia’s Bis-marck may be most apposite. Stolypin, too, was widely believed to be a“man of iron and blood,” determined at all costs to impose his will on thecountry, and, like Bismarck, he was guided by two principal concerns: tostrengthen the state and to preserve the existing political order. Again likeBismarck, he was prepared to use a variety of means—progressive as wellas reactionary, legal as well as illegal—to achieve his goals. Despite hisstrong personality, he always remained loyal to the tsar, believing himselfto be simply the “executor of his plans and commands.” In this he differedfrom Bismarck, who, according to a contemporary journalist, “combinedin his person both a powerful locomotive and the driver of the machine,”whereas Stolypin “appeared to . . . be only the locomotive.”

Within two days of assuming the post of prime minister, Stolypinsought to mobilize support among Western governments and liberals inRussia by assuring them that he was not a reactionary. In a lengthy inter-view with the correspondent of Reuters on July 13, he vowed to pursue atwo-pronged approach in seeking to solve the country’s problems: pacifi-cation and reform. But he left no doubt about his priorities: “The revo-lution must be suppressed, and only then will it be possible to establishthe definitive and firm bases for the future regime.” He defended the dis-solution of the Duma as entirely constitutional, but insisted that he hadno intention of abolishing it altogether. At the same time, he made it clearthat he was not a “parliamentarist” because he did not believe in the po-litical supremacy of the legislature. He was, instead, a “constitutionalist,”that is, he wished to maintain the system of government affirmed by theFundamental Laws of 1906: the monarch would retain his authority, buthe would govern in accordance with the rule of law. Stolypin’s overallprogram can perhaps be best described as that of an authoritarian re-former: authoritarian on political questions, reformist on social and eco-nomic questions.

In an endeavor to overcome society’s distrust, Stolypin made anotherattempt to co-opt leading figures from the opposition into his govern-ment. By July 11, two days after he took office, he had made overtures toseven moderates, all men who had gone out of their way to shun any ac-tivity that could be construed as illegal. He did not approach the Kadets,whom he considered too radical. Reports on Stolypin’s discussions withthe moderates made their way into the daily newspapers, underlining theriskiness of the prime minister’s initiative. If the negotiations yielded noresults, his government’s prestige would suffer a serious blow at the verymoment it was trying to organize itself. The tsar took part in some of the

negotiations, but even his intervention did not lead to an agreement.There were two main sticking points: some moderates wanted Stolypin tocommit himself to the immediate abolition of capital punishment, whileothers insisted that the prime minister agree to a speedy convocation ofthe Duma and to a common, and specific, program that would guide thecabinet. Both these demands were unacceptable to Stolypin, and wouldcertainly have been rejected by the tsar because their implementationwould have signified a further dilution of the autocratic structure of gov-ernment. And given the passions aroused by the dissolution of the Duma,the moderates could hardly be expected to show more flexibility. Hadthey done so, their standing in society would have plummeted. Stolypinconsidered his failure to broaden the government a serious blow to hisoverall strategy. To make matters worse, newspapers immediately pub-lished rumors that the court had already decided, only twelve days afterthe change of government, to replace the prime minister with a dictator.

That was mere speculation that did not take into account Stolypin’s re-sourcefulness. He reorganized the cabinet, which turned out to be morecompetent and energetic than Goremykin’s, although the opposition didnot consider it much of an improvement. True, Stolypin forced the resig-nation of two of the most outspoken reactionaries and replaced themwith moderates who held some Octobrist sympathies. But most of themen appointed by Goremykin remained at their posts, and only three ofthem could be regarded as slightly moderate. P. Kh. Schwanebach, an un-reconstructed reactionary and probably the most effective intriguer on theextreme right, continued to serve as state comptroller. He was not on goodterms with the Stolypin and did his best to undermine him at court, where,it was generally known, he wielded considerable influence. The criticalpoint was that the government still consisted of men drawn from the bu-reaucracy; as a consequence it could not command the trust of society.

At the very time Stolypin was conducting the negotiations with moder-ates, he faced his first major crisis as prime minister: an eruption of mu-tinies in Sveaborg, Kronstadt, and Revel (Tallinn) and political strikes insome cities that for a few days appeared to be the mass upheaval the rad-icals had been predicting and hoping for. Actually, although Social De-mocratic activists had been aware of deep disaffection among the sailorsin the three ports, no firm plans had been made to launch an armed at-tack on the government. To the contrary, the outbursts of unrest caughtthe revolutionaries by surprise.

The troubles began in Sveaborg, where on July 15 a group of disaf-fected artillerymen met with employees of the mine company on the island

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and a few other soldiers to discuss plans for an uprising. But before theycould carry out any of their plans, about two hundred men of the minecompany were arrested for some “minor misdeeds,” setting off a mutinyby militants in the local garrison, who arrested two officers and seizedcontrol of several fortifications. Three thousand soldiers and sailorsjoined the mutiny, which quickly spread to Helsingfors, but many sol-diers remained loyal to the government. Fierce fighting broke out amongtroops in Sveaborg and continued for two days, prompting the com-mander of the Sveaborg fortress to inform his superiors that the “situa-tion was critical” and that he needed more troops to cope with the insur-rection. Shortly, two companies of Finnish infantrymen arrived inHelsingfors and almost immediately the tide began to turn in favor of thegovernment. During the night of July 19, the insurgents, demoralized, de-cided to surrender. A fair number of rebels somehow managed to escape,but hundreds were arrested.

In the meantime, violence erupted in Kronstadt, where on July 19,sailors, fired up by exhortations from eleven civilian militants, initiatedanother mutiny. Emboldened by claims that the uprising in Sveaborg wassucceeding, that a decision had been reached by political activists to stagean uprising throughout the country, and that four large warships werejoining the insurgents, the sailors struck at midnight: they secured thesupport of sailors at various locations in the city, but most soldiers re-mained loyal to the government and no warship joined the uprising.Within short order, men from the 94th Enisei Regiment began to fire atthe mutineers, who beat a hasty retreat. The insurgents’ one triumph wastheir seizure of the Konstantin Fortress, but after four hours loyal soldiersforced them to surrender. The entire disturbance in Kronstadt, from plot-ting to surrender, lasted no more than thirty hours. The city was placedunder martial law, loyal troops arrested more than sixteen hundred mu-tineers, and immediately after the uprising had been put down, militarycourts sentenced seven mutineers to death.

The last mutiny in this series took place on the cruiser Pamiat Azova,on July 20, but before the day was out the loyal men on the ship over-whelmed the mutineers and regained control. Late in the evening thatday, two companies of infantry boarded the cruiser and arrested the in-surgents and all those considered unreliable, a total of about two hun-dred sailors.

In view of the three mutinies’ brevity, revolutionary activists, whoagainst their better judgment supported the uprisings, were hard put toprovide effective support. Still, they felt that they could not stand aside.On Lenin’s recommendation, an appeal was issued (most probably onJuly 19) in the name of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, calling on the

workers to initiate a general strike. The Central Committee of the RS-DWP joined in the appeal, but when news reached St. Petersburg that themutinies in Sveaborg and Kronstadt had been quelled, Lenin wanted torescind the appeal. It was too late, however, to inform the local districtsof the reversal. The fact that the strike had lost its raison d’être, supportfor the mutineers, may partially explain its ineffectiveness. In any case, inthe capital only about one-third of the factories were seriously affectedby the work stoppage, and within a few days even that strike began to pe-ter out. On July 25 the Executive Committee of the soviet urged workersto end the walkout. But the government took no chances because, asStolypin put it, “the smallest revolt in Petersburg will evoke an echothroughout the entire country and will compromise us in Europe.” Twodivisions of soldiers were brought to the capital to crush the protestmovement quickly. Twenty-seven members of the St. Petersburg Com-mittee of the RSDWP were quickly arrested and calm returned to the city.

Only in Moscow was there a protest movement of any significance,and even there it did not amount to a serious challenge to the authorities.The newly formed Soviet of Workers’ Deputies asked workers to begin astrike on July 24 in support of the slogan “Creation of a Constituent As-sembly by Means of a Revolution,” but the action seems to have been ef-fective only in the city’s printing plants, all of which closed down. Inother enterprises, most workers ignored the call to strike; all in all, onlyabout 30,000 people in a total industrial workforce of about 160,000laid down their tools. Within a day, as it became evident that there wouldbe no general strike, some men began to trickle back to work and the So-viet of Workers’ Deputies, claiming that the “partial action” had beenuseful, declared the strike ended as of 2:00 pm on July 26.

The failure of the July disturbances to develop into an insurrection ona national scale once again demonstrated how difficult it was to gaugethe mood of the masses. On hearing the news of the disorders in Sve-aborg, Miliukov, who had all along predicted a major upheaval in re-sponse to a dissolution of the Duma, declared that this “was the first signof a terrible hurricane.” When he realized how mistaken he had been, hedrew comfort from the British prime minister’s reaction to the dissolu-tion: “The Duma is dead; long live the Duma.” Miliukov indicated that“this happy formula . . . must be the central thought of all defenders of apopular legislature.”

The main beneficiary of the uprising’s quick collapse was the govern-ment, whose self-confidence was markedly bolstered. Stolypin attributedthe failure of the left primarily to the firm measures taken by the author-ities. As he put it, “This experience demonstrates anew that in Russia,more even than in other countries, order can be maintained only when



the government demonstrates its real power without fear and without be-ing influenced by sentiment.” He was convinced that the revolutionarieswere now thoroughly demoralized and the “organs of order” revitalized.The masses had come to realize that a “strong arm” ruled over them, andthis would make it possible to restore respect for order and private prop-erty and to institute far-reaching reform.

The government provided abundant evidence of its resolve to use itsstrong arm by severely punishing the mutineers and their sympathizers.Forty-five of the former were executed and another ninety were incarcer-ated for varying terms. Workers at the city’s printing office in St. Peters-burg who had gone out on strike had to sign a statement drawn up by theauthorities indicating that they wished to be reinstated and that theypromised not to participate in any sort of meeting or join any strike at an“establishment that is important to the public or the state.” In the capitaland in Moscow, the police deprived many unions of their legal status. Inseveral other cities of the empire, the police actions against unions weresomewhat less draconian but nevertheless stern.

Still, it is a mistake to conclude, as did many of his contemporariesand historians, that Stolypin was a bloodthirsty tyrant whose preferredmethod of dealing with the disaffected was brute force. In a circular ofSeptember 15 marked “Strictly Confidential” that was sent to all gover-nors-general, governors, and city governors, he stressed that he hadlearned during his days as governor of Saratov that force alone would notsuffice to defeat the opposition. He was convinced that the best way todefeat the radicals was to cut the ground from under them by deprivingthem of popular support. He listed a series of measures that officialsshould take to accomplish this. The circular was, in effect, a handbookon how to outfox and defeat the radical left.

For example, Stolypin urged local officials to familiarize themselveswith the peasants’ economic grievances by visiting areas of unrest, speak-ing directly to peasants, and then taking steps to help them. If the au-thorities discover that peasants in their regions were waiting for the Peas-ants’ Bank to conclude loans for the purchase of land, every effort shouldbe made to speed up the transactions. Governors must also be vigilant inprotecting peasants against excessive and illegal demands by landlords.Furthermore, the police must be trained to take action to prevent disor-der, not merely to put it down. They should maintain a close watch onagitators, and outsiders bent on troublemaking should be quickly re-moved from the region. And if the police learned of impending unrest ina locality, a senior official should immediately appear on the scene and at-tempt to restore calm. If that failed, the authorities should quickly sendadditional forces to the area, “keeping in mind that the appearance in

advance of sufficient forces can prevent a misfortune.” But if violence nev-ertheless erupted, local officials must take the “most decisive measures.”

Stolypin conceded that he was placing “a complicated task” on therepresentatives of governmental authority. But he assured them that theywere being asked to perform a great service to the state, which was expe-riencing an “historical moment, when new political structures wereemerging.” Stolypin left no doubt in the minds of Russian civil servantsthat he would force them to change their customary ways of doing thegovernment’s business and that he planned to mobilize the entire bureau-cracy in his drive to realize his vision for revitalizing the country. He be-lieved that in large measure the revolutionaries’ success over the preced-ing two years could be attributed to “the confusion, flabbiness, andapathy of government authorities.” He wished to “lead the country fromdisturbance to tranquillity” by pursuing policies that would not only putan end to violence but also would inspire confidence in the government.“By stopping revolutionary actions at the very beginning,” Stolypin toldsenior officials, “even with the most severe legal measures, local authori-ties instill in the population trust in the strength of the authorities and thestability of the law.”

curbing terrorism

After the collapse of the July uprising Stolypin could breathe easier aboutthe threat of revolution, but not for long. He soon had to contend withanother outbreak of violence, a new avalanche of terror. Emanating fromboth the right and left, the rash of murders and robberies appeared to bemore brazen and widespread than ever before. The incidents of violencecould not overturn the old order, but they could undermine its authority.

The first major incident during Stolypin’s ministry occurred on July 18,when M. Ia. Herzenstein was assassinated while on vacation in Terioki,Finland. The extremists on the right despised Herzenstein with a specialpassion: a Kadet deputy representing Moscow, he had been the leadingadvocate in the Duma of the expropriation of privately owned land (withcompensation). Moreover, by their lights he was a Jew, although he hadin fact been converted to Russian Orthodoxy as a young man and hadmarried a woman of the Orthodox faith. For the ultraconservatives, itsufficed that as a Duma deputy he had spoken out vigorously against therestrictions imposed on Jews and had denounced the anti-Jewishpogroms.

Society, already agitated over the dissolution of the Duma, was deeplyaffected by the murder, and many suspected the government of being



somehow implicated in the bloody business. To avoid a repetition of theviolence that had accompanied the funeral of Bauman the previous Oc-tober, Herzenstein’s wife insisted on having her husband buried inTerioki. Even so, the funeral was attended by some ten thousand people,many of them prominent citizens who had come from St. Petersburg andother parts of the country. Numerous armed infantry and cavalryguarded the train station and the streets along the funeral procession.Groups of workers carrying red flags marched peacefully to the cemetery.

Various police investigations uncovered evidence that implicated theUnion of the Russian People (URP) in the murder. It turned out that N.M. Iuskevich-Krasovskii, a close associate of A. I. Dubrovin, the leaderof the URP, had given Aleksandr Kazantsev, an unemployed worker, onethousand rubles to kill Herzenstein. Iuskevich-Krasovskii and Kazantsevand two accomplices were put on trial, found guilty, and given prisonsentences of various terms. It proved to be a wasted effort. After receivingpetitions for clemency from the URP, the tsar pardoned the four men.

The URP’s violence was more than matched by terrorism from the left.On August 13, the weekly journal Pravo reported that no fewer thantwenty-eight assassinations had taken place during the preceding sevendays in various cities of the empire. A week later the same journal re-ported another twenty-three such incidents. The daily press contained somany accounts of violence that its absence was considered newsworthy.“Today was an exceptional day [in Warsaw],” Rech reported on Septem-ber 9; “there was no bloodshed and no robbery.” Terrorists frequentlytargeted policemen of various ranks, but they also proved adept at gun-ning down senior officials. On August 13, they killed the notorious G. A.Min, and a day later they shot to death the acting governor-general ofWarsaw, General A. V. Vonliarliarskii.

The discovery of numerous caches of weapons and evidence of the im-portation of arms from abroad suggested that the violence was likely tocontinue for a long time. Over a period of a few weeks the police in St.Petersburg discovered 223 bombs, more than 3,000 pounds of dynamite,183 revolvers, 3,302 rifles, and about 400,000 cartridges. In mid-Augustthe authorities learned that a shipment of arms valued at one hundredthousand German marks had recently been sent from Hamburg to Rus-sia. In Kerch (Crimea) a barrel filled with revolvers and cartridges wasfound hidden in the main synagogue. In the Cherkassk region, a policesearch of peasant households in early August turned up more than 1,000rifles and 486 revolvers. These finds suggested that something of a moremassive nature than acts of individual terrorism was being planned.

The accounts of violence in the empire during the months from July toapproximately November could be vastly expanded; virtually no regionof the country remained entirely immune, though some areas were harder

hit than others. But no purpose would be served, especially since no suchaccount could be complete. The essential point is the pervasiveness of ter-ror from below and the government’s inability to put a stop to it. The po-lice found it difficult to keep the terrorists under surveillance or to ap-prehend them because they operated in small groups, moved frequentlyfrom one location to another, and made their preparations very quicklybefore striking their targets. Nor could the police rely on their agents,who had supposedly penetrated the terrorist organizations; some of themturned out to be loyal to the radicals. And the terrorists seemed to havean ample supply of funds, most of them derived from so-called partisanactions, which were actually armed robberies.

Many of the assassinations were the work of the Maximalists, a tinycircle of fanatics who had split off from the Socialist Revolutionary Party.Their most notorious exploit was the bombing of Stolypin’s summer homeon August 12, an action that dramatized the danger to the government ofthe wave of violence sweeping the country. It led to one of the most sus-tained, brutal, and controversial campaigns of government repression.

August 12 was a Saturday, which is why Stolypin was at his dacha onAptekarskii, one of the islands in the Neva River. As was his custom, hedevoted several hours that day to receiving petitioners with special re-quests. Many people were therefore in and around the residence early inthe afternoon, when there appeared three men, two in army officers’dress, each carrying a briefcase loaded with bombs. The guards becamesuspicious of one of the men, and when they tried to inspect his briefcase,all three, shouting revolutionary slogans, threw their bags to the ground,producing an enormous explosion. The assailants died on the spot, as didtwenty-seven people standing nearby—among them General Zamiatinand three other senior officials. Another seventy were injured as the fa-cade of the building completely collapsed. Among the seriously woundedwere two of Stolypin’s children.

The prime minister himself had escaped with nothing more than mi-nor cuts on his face. He remained remarkably calm and as soon as he hadarranged for the care of his children he took charge of the rescue efforts.Then, after moving his family to the Winter Palace for reasons of secu-rity, he continued his normal routine as head of government. Ironically,the terrorists unwittingly made it possible for Stolypin to enhance his rep-utation with his show of fortitude in the face of danger. Often criticizedfor his provincialism, he was now viewed by people at court and in soci-ety as a noble and courageous man deeply devoted to his country. “Hegained in stature,” Kokovtsov recalled, “and was unanimously acclaimedmaster of the situation.”

Outraged by the incident, the extremists on the right demanded stern



measures to combat terror, including the establishment of a dictatorship.Stolypin did not favor such a drastic step, though he did want to take en-ergetic action to root out lawlessness. But as he had repeatedly noted inhis directives to governors and other officials, he did not want the gov-ernment to act without due respect for the law. Even after the attempt onhis life, he believed that the introduction of unduly harsh measures wouldprobably not be effective and would only deepen the hostility of societytoward the government. However, he came under intense pressure, pri-marily from the tsar, to be more forceful. Fearful that if he did not pro-duce a new, tough policy the tsar would opt for a dictatorship, Stolypinreluctantly decided to bring the matter before the cabinet, where only oneperson, Minister of Justice Shcheglovitov, normally a hard-liner, sharedhis misgivings. The result was the notorious law on field courts-martial,which was adopted by the government on August 19 under the emer-gency authority granted it by Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws.

A sweeping measure, it quickly became one of the most contentious ofStolypin’s entire tenure as prime minister. It applied to all areas undermartial law or under Extraordinary Security—in effect, most of the em-pire. It stated that whenever it was “so obvious” that a civilian had com-mitted a crime that no investigation was necessary, the case was to behanded over to a field court composed of five military officers selected bythe governor-general, the chief local administrator, or individuals investedwith comparable authority. Within twenty-four hours of his arrest, theaccused would appear before the court, which must conclude the trialwithin two days. All the court’s work must be conducted “behind closeddoors” according to legal procedures established for the military services.Once sentences had been handed down, they “immediately acquire theforce of law” and must be carried out within one day. Thus, the entireprocess from start to finish would take no more than four days.

The law was, of course, a travesty of due process and even of militaryjustice. “If guilt was so obvious,” one historian has noted, “why have tri-als at all?” Virtually all leaders of society and most of the press de-nounced the law in the strongest terms, and only one prominent figure insociety, A. I. Guchkov, defended the measure. Guchkov believed the newprocedures were necessary to put down the revolution and preserve thepolitical freedoms secured since 1905. “I deeply believe in Stolypin,” hesaid. “We have not had such able and talented persons in power.” Shipov,the grand old man of the Union of October 17, was so appalled that heresigned from the party, warning that the law would promote “theprocess of demoralization and extremism in society.” People from all cor-ners of Russia sent telegrams to Shipov congratulating him on his breakwith the Octobrists.

The extensive and vivid coverage in the press of every detail that wasknown about the trials, the punishments, and the heroism of the victimswas bound to inflame public passions. On September 14, Tovarishch an-nounced that during the first sixteen days of their operation, the fieldcourts had sentenced twenty-seven people to death and listed the cities inwhich the executions had been carried out. Shortly thereafter liberalnewspapers periodically ran columns headed “Field Courts-Martial,” inwhich they gave the gruesome details of the executions. In the periodfrom October 6 to November 6, a total of 112 individuals were put todeath, somewhat below the monthly average for the eight months the lawremained on the books. By early February 1907 the total number of exe-cutions had reached 771. When the law was allowed to lapse on April19, 1907, it had taken a terrible toll: 1,144 men had been executed, and349 people had been sentenced to hard labor, 443 to prison terms ofvarying periods, and 7 to exile. Only 71 of the accused were acquitted.

The law on the field courts-martial left deep scars in society long afterit had lapsed. During a debate in the Third Duma, in November 1907,the Kadet deputy F. I. Rodichev referred to the noose that had been usedto hang the courts’ victims as “the Stolypin necktie.” For dramatic effect,he used his arms to indicate how the rope was fastened around the neckof the victims. Stolypin and the cabinet stalked out of the chamber, andsubsequently the prime minister challenged Rodichev to a duel. Rodichevapologized to the prime minister, explaining that he had not intended apersonal slur. Stolypin was mollified and accepted the apology, but theDuma voted overwhelmingly to suspend Rodichev for the next fifteenmeetings of the legislature. The phrase “the Stolypin tie” came to sym-bolize the ruthlessness of Stolypin’s regime.

Although Stolypin had initially been reluctant to introduce the fieldcourts-martial, he now defended them as necessary in the struggle againstterrorism. “You always think,” Stolypin told a Kadet deputy who hadasked him to intercede on behalf of several men thought to be innocent,

that you can ask the authorities to act on the basis of starry-eyed idealism. Theauthorities bear a terrible responsibility. I have the facts here . . . : you demandthe abolition of the military field-courts, [but] look at this chart. Each day, themore the Duma deliberates [about abolishing capital punishment], the greater thenumber of victims, dead policemen, constables. Terror continues and grows. Ihave a responsibility in this. You do not have the right to demand that I abolishcapital punishment.

Stolypin did face unrest of frightening proportions, but it is not at allevident that his government’s measures were effective. None of the figureson the frequency of terror before and after the draconian law were con-clusive. In the autumn of 1906, the British ambassador to St. Petersburg,



who closely followed the implementation of the law on field courts-mar-tial, offered an astute assessment of its impact on the country. He grantedthat the measure may have reduced terror and that “public opinion isnot, for the moment, revolutionary, as it was a year ago, but it may bedoubted whether it is for that reason any more reconciled to a continu-ance of the present regime.”

The last point is critical. Even if the authorities succeeded in reducinglawlessness through its new instrument, pacification achieved by suchmeans was bound to widen the chasm between state and society. Admit-tedly, reliance on due process by the government would have been moreexpensive, since it would have required a larger police force and an ex-panded judiciary. But such an approach to disorder would have gainedthe sympathy of large sectors of society. Equally important, it wouldprobably have engendered a greater respect for the law. As the primeminister himself rightly saw, the traditions of the country and the perva-sive hostility toward authority were major obstacles that would have tobe overcome if he was to succeed in his efforts to create a state based onthe rule of law. Lawless conduct by the government made matters worse.It served as a bad example and impeded the emergence of a genuine senseof citizenship.

The law on field courts-martial was only the most dramatic and mostdraconian aspect of Stolypin’s campaign against the opposition. Immedi-ately after the dissolution of the Duma, he initiated a crackdown againstthe press that continued for months. Determined to prevent the dissemi-nation of the Vyborg Manifesto, he ordered his subordinates to securesigned statements from all owners of printing presses in the country thatthey would not print the document. In addition, the police conducted in-numerable searches of offices and private homes and arrested thousandsof citizens suspected of being “untrustworthy.”

The government’s campaign was directed with special rigor against theKadets. On July 11, two gendarmes appeared at the offices of the Kadets’“central club” in St. Petersburg and closed it down. Policemen constantlypatrolled the street in front of the building to prevent anyone from enter-ing, and within a few days district clubs in the capital were also closed.Late in the summer, Stolypin refused to permit the Kadets, never regis-tered as a legal party, to hold a congress, and early in October, the Coun-cil of Ministers issued a circular to officials ordering them to dismiss fromgovernment service anyone who belonged to the Kadet Party.

Punishing the men who had signed the Vyborg Manifesto becamesomething of an idée fixe with Stolypin. He persisted in regarding the

former deputies as unreconstructed revolutionaries, even though theKadet Party had within a matter of weeks decided not to pursue the tac-tic of passive disobedience. First, he urged governors to take “the mostdecisive measures” against former deputies who were circulating themanifesto among the peasants and agitating for militant action againstthe government; this was directed mainly at the parties to the left of theKadets. Then the government brought formal charges under Article 129of the Criminal Code against everyone (about 230) who had signed thedocument. It was a year and a half before the case came to trial, but inthe meantime the accused were disqualified from standing for election tothe Second Duma. The former deputies were tried not for drafting themanifesto but for conspiring to distribute it, a more serious charge thatcarried the penalty of imprisonment and deprivation of political rights. Atotal of 166 were found guilty, sentenced to prison for three months, andprohibited from engaging in political activities.

the turn to reform

Faithful to the promise he had made on assuming the leadership of thegovernment not to rely only on repression to pacify the country, Stolypinsought to introduce some modest legal reforms. In mid-October 1906 thegovernment issued a ukase lifting various restrictions on Old Believersand other dissenting sects, recognizing them as legitimate associationswhose rights would be virtually equal to those of the official OrthodoxChurch. But another reform proposal along these lines, lifting some re-strictions on the Jews, ran afoul of the tsar’s prejudices.

Whether Stolypin was well disposed toward Jews is still a matter ofdispute. Some contemporaries accused him of hostility toward them,whereas others hailed him as their friend. He himself insisted that he was“by no means an anti-Semite,” and in a private note for his own eyesonly he stated that it was wrong to “arouse and embitter a race of fivemillion people,” and that the government cannot tolerate “a situationunder which a part of its citizens can justly consider itself offended andlooks for relief in violence.” Still, he maintained that it would be unwise“to solve the Jewish question by one stroke of the pen as absolute justicewould demand.” Such an action would not serve the interests of the Jews,he argued, for it would arouse popular hostility toward them and wouldprovoke a new round of pogroms. Instead, he proposed abolishing someof the most egregious restrictions imposed on them. Thus, although heindicated that he would retain the Pale of Settlement as well as the law



prohibiting Jews from buying or leasing land in the rural regions of thePale, he would permit those Jews who had engaged in trade outside thePale for ten years to remain outside it. And in those areas within the Palewhere Jews were allowed to engage in trade and industry, various restric-tions would be abolished, placing them “on a nearly equal footing withother Russians.” The official documents of Jews who had converted toChristianity would no longer indicate the original religious affiliation.Stolypin also intended to submit to the next legislature reform proposalson other aspects of the Jewish question. There was nothing very far-reaching in all this, but the adoption of the reforms would have pointedto a shift in government direction on a contentious issue.

Before Stolypin submitted his modest measure to the tsar, he soughtthe approval of his cabinet, whose deliberations early in October demon-strated that the very mention of the Jewish question aroused the deepestpassions in government circles. During spirited debates several ministersexpressed their dislike for the Jews and their reservations about liftingany restrictions on them, but in the end they all agreed with Stolypin thatthe measure should be sent to Nicholas, in part because they wanted toconciliate foreign bankers and journalists, who took a dim view of Rus-sian anti-Semitism, and in part because they hoped that the reformswould discourage Jews from joining the revolutionary movement. Every-one assumed that Nicholas favored Stolypin’s proposal; it did not occurto anyone that the prime minister would bring up so sensitive a matterwithout first talking things over with the tsar. In this instance, they over-estimated Stolypin’s sagacity. Weeks passed without any word from thecourt on the measure, and when Nicholas’s decision finally arrived onDecember 10 the cabinet was stunned. Nicholas indicated that he hadthought about the Jewish question “night and day” and had concludedthat he could not approve of any relaxation of the restrictions. “An innervoice,” he said, “keeps insisting more and more that I do not take this de-cision upon myself. So far, my conscience has not deceived me. ThereforeI intend to follow its dictates. I know that you too believe that ‘the heartof the Tsar is in God’s hands.’ So be it. For all those whom I have placedin authority I bear an awesome responsibility before God and am readyat any time to account to Him.” Even Kokovtsov, a fervent believer in theprinciple of autocracy, was surprised at this display by the tsar of his“mystical attitude toward the nature of his imperial power.” Stolypintold Nicholas that he would not try to change his mind and would makesure that the official documents on the cabinet’s deliberations would bechanged in such a way as not to place the blame on him for the failure ofthe Jewish reform proposal. Privately, in conversations with the Britishambassador to St. Petersburg he continued to express support for a more

liberal policy toward the Jews. But as an ardent believer in monarchicalrule, he felt he could not take a public stance in opposition to the tsar.

The tsar’s prejudices, political naïveté, and intransigence surfaced witheven more forcefulness in a candid conversation he had with the Germanambassador in mid-January, just a few weeks after he had vetoed the Jew-ish reform measure. Nicholas expressed delight at the recent defeat of thesocialists in the German election, not only because he considered this awholesome development for Germany but also because he was sure thatit would dampen the spirits of Russian radicals, who looked up to theirGerman comrades. He was certain, moreover, that in Germany, as inRussia, there was “a close connection between demagoguery and inter-national Jewry, which is undoubtedly the real driving force behind theRussian revolution.”

The tsar then indicated that the Jews were not the only people he dis-liked. “The English,” the tsar told the ambassador, “are too egotisticaland the French too disorderly to have a claim on our sympathies. Notmuch good for the development of the world can be expected from theItalians and Spaniards.” His own people, the Russians, as well as the en-tire Slavic “race,” had many good qualities and great natural strength,but little character. Moreover, because they had endured the Mongolyoke for centuries, they remained culturally at a “lamentably low level.”The Finns were at an even lower level, “especially with regard to moral-ity, and nothing good is to be expected from them.” Faced with such in-adequate human resources, the tsar drew what he considered to be an ob-vious conclusion about his own role in his country’s affairs. “He isstrongly determined,” the German ambassador noted, “to continue to rulewith an iron hand and views the future with confidence, even if the nextelections to the Duma again demonstrate that the Russian people do nothave the maturity to appreciate the benefits that He has granted them.”

Even before he had been forced to retreat on the Jewish reform measure,Stolypin offered rather sober assessments of the state of affairs in the em-pire. Although optimistic about Russia’s eventual recovery from its “ill-nesses,” he was not sanguine about the immediate future. Stolypin fore-saw three possible developments for the coming year, two of which didnot augur well for the reestablishment of political stability: his own“tragic” disappearance (the recent attempt on his life was clearly on hismind); the election of a moderate Duma, with which the governmentwould seek to cooperate on legislative proposals; more likely, the electionof a socialist Duma, which the government would have to dissolve.

The prime minister had good reason to be pessimistic. The court had



just taken the pulse of the population in the provinces, and the resultswere not reassuring. It was evident that the split within the Union of Oc-tober 17 between Guchkov and Shipov had diminished the moderates’chances of doing well in the upcoming elections of the Second Duma. Atthe same time, the right-wing parties, which were making strong effortsto mobilize mass support, did not seem to be attracting a large enoughfollowing to win many seats. The most optimistic statement Stolypinwould allow himself was “that affairs were not worse than they [hadbeen], and in this country this could be regarded as tantamount to sayingthat they were a little better.”

Stolypin had other reasons to be pessimistic. Stories circulating amongthe political elite suggested that his own position was shaky. His influenceat court was said to have declined, and there was talk of his being askedto surrender the portfolio of minister of internal affairs. Ironically, theease with which Stolypin had succeeded in dissolving the Duma tended toundermine his authority and his program. If it was so easy to send theDuma packing, some of the tsar’s advisers argued, “why retain Stolypinat all, with his policy of continued constitutionalism?” Nicholas sympa-thized with this position, but he was not yet prepared to renege com-pletely on the promises he had made in the October Manifesto becausehe did not wish to offend the political classes at home and the financialcircles abroad, both of which favored retaining an elected legislature.

Nicholas’s stance troubled many ultraconservatives. Increasingly, theydirected barbs at the tsar for irresolution in defending his prerogativesand even for incompetence. At saloons, the reactionary publisher ofMoskovskie vedomosti and leader of the Monarchist Party, V. A. Gring-mut, amused his friends with a description of a cartoon that had recentlyappeared in a magazine. The tsar was sitting on his throne, and the tsa-rina was behind a screen as the ministers reported to him on various is-sues and made recommendations. Nicholas expressed agreement witheach minister. After the reports had been concluded, he sank into a tor-por, confessing to his wife that he had understood nothing his ministershad told him, to which the tsarina responded: “I agree with that.”

To add to the prime minister’s troubles, in November 1906 his gov-ernment was touched by a scandal that eroded confidence in his govern-ment. It came to light that in his capacity as deputy minister of internalaffairs, the conservative firebrand Gurko had signed a contract with ashady firm named Lidval to supply some 160,000 tons of grain for dis-tribution in several provinces stricken by famine. Gurko had agreed ona price higher than the bids made by other firms and had advanced alarge sum of money to Lidval. Even then, Lidval delivered less than halfthe grain provided for in the contract. The opposition press exposed the

misappropriation of funds and demanded that the officials who had nego-tiated the contract be punished. The ultraconservatives in turn threatenedto kill leading Kadets if their hero, Gurko, was dismissed. The tsar had nochoice but to appoint a commission to look into the matter. The evidenceof wrongdoing was so overwhelming that the contract with Lidval wassuspended even before the commission completed its work, and Gurkowas forced to resign in December 1906. About a year later, in a trial be-fore the Special Senate Board, Gurko was found guilty of having misap-propriated funds. But beyond that the board treated Gurko gently; itmerely disqualified him from occupying any public office for three years.

peasants into citizens

For Stolypin, Gurko’s departure from government service was a seriousloss. Gurko had been a chief architect of Stolypin’s agrarian reforms, inmany ways the crowning achievement in his five years as prime minister.Although the reforms were in the deepest sense innovative and wroughtfundamental changes in the countryside, the ideas they embodied hadbeen discussed by experts and officials for several decades. Indeed, eversince the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, there had been a growingawareness in Russian society that far-reaching measures were required tocope with the country’s economic backwardness and to stimulate eco-nomic growth. The emancipation had freed the serfs, but it had alsostrengthened the commune, an institution that had a large say in regulat-ing the peasants’ affairs and was widely believed by experts to have ham-pered economic progress in the countryside. About 80 percent of thecommunes periodically redivided land among villagers to maintain theequality of allotments assigned to peasant families, the size of whichwould naturally vary over years. Thus, there was no tradition of privatelandownership among the bulk of the country’s population, and so longas the peasants did not own the land they worked, they lacked the incen-tive to modernize their farms and improve efficiency. Moreover, becauseof the sharp increase in Russia’s population from 1861 to 1905 (by some40 percent), the average allotment assigned to peasants, in most cases notovergenerous to start with, declined by 25 percent. The various commis-sions the government established in the late nineteenth and early twenti-eth centuries to study the deficiencies of agriculture all agreed that indo-lence, low productivity, alcoholism, and indigence were the main featuresof the countryside. The commissions set forth a series of proposals thatwould become the basis of Stolypin’s reform program.



This is not to minimize Stolypin’s role in the reform process. He hadhimself sensed the need for change as far back as the late 1880s and therecommendations on Saratov he had sent to the tsar in 1904 adumbratedthe reforms of 1906. Most important, as prime minister he was the driv-ing force behind their implementation by taking the initiative on the is-sue and conveying a sense of urgency for speedy action. Soon after as-suming the leadership of the government, he directed Gurko to preparebills incorporating the proposals for reform. Once that had been done, itwas largely up to Stolypin to ward off the opposition of influentialSlavophiles like F. D. Samarin, who were nostalgically attached to thecommune as the bedrock of stability in the countryside, and to persuadethe Council of Ministers to support the reforms. Kokovtsov, Prince B. A.Vasilchikov, the minister of agriculture, and Prince A. D. Obolenskiithought that it would be a mistake to introduce such fundamentalchanges by government fiat. They wanted the measure to be passed bythe Duma, but Stolypin doubted that the legislature would approve hisproposals, which did not provide for the expropriation of privatelyowned lands. In view of the Duma’s handling of the agrarian issue, therecan be little doubt that Stolypin was right. Gurko supported Stolypin, ar-guing that under normal conditions the approach recommended byVasilchikov would be appropriate, but given the prevailing turbulence,extraordinary procedures were necessary. “The vital interest of the coun-try,” he insisted, “must be placed above this or that provision of the law.”On October 10 a majority of the cabinet voted to enact the program un-der the emergency provisions of Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws, andon November 9 the tsar gave his formal approval; the ukase was prom-ulgated on that date.

In sponsoring the agrarian reforms, Stolypin was motivated by muchmore than a desire to improve the country’s economy. He believed thatthey would transform the peasants’ attitudes on a whole range of issues,that they would produce a fundamental change in the mentalité of thepeople. The most critical problem in Russia, according to Stolypin, wasthat the peasants, who composed the vast majority of the population,were wholly lacking in civic spirit (grazhdanstvennost); they did not re-spect the laws of society, and they had no clearly developed sense of pub-lic obligation. In short, peasants were not yet citizens in the full meaningof the word. His goal, Stolypin stressed, was to transform them into citi-zens by giving them a stake in society, by making them realize that orderand discipline were in their own interest. Unless the masses in the coun-tryside were converted into citizens respectful of order, a state based onlaw was inconceivable. Stolypin’s model, no doubt, was the West, where,as one historian has put it, “property rights have historically provided the

basis for other civil and political rights. Ultimately, the person has as-sumed the inviolability granted to property.” In sum, Stolypin aimed atnothing less than a transformation of the peasantry’s psychology in thedeepest sense of the word.

In several speeches justifying the reforms—delivered after they had al-ready been enacted—Stolypin used phrases that tended to muddy the wa-ters by giving the impression that the reforms were designed to help onlythe well-to-do peasants, the so-called kulaks. Thus, in 1908 he declaredthat the ukase of November 9 “placed a wager not on the wretched anddrunken, but on the sturdy and strong.” But what his critics overlookedwas that in the same speech he also made clear that he was not speaking ofa small sector of the peasantry; the “strong people” he had in mind were“the majority in Russia.” And every effort had to made on their behalf:

All the powers of both the legislator and the government must be exerted towardraising the productive forces of the sole source of our well-being—the land. Byapplying to it personal labor, by applying to it the powers of all our people with-out exception, we must raise up our impoverished, weak, exhausted land, sincethe land is the pledge of our strength in the future; the land is Russia.

A careful reading of this and several other speeches by Stolypin on theagrarian reforms shows that when he used the word “strong” he wasthinking not of peasants who were economically strong (that is, rich), butof peasants who were psychologically strong: rational beings who under-stood their own interests and were prepared to take initiatives to bettertheir own lives. They were, in short, strong in willpower. Every peasantso inclined would be given an opportunity to abandon old habits ofwork, which had proved so disastrous, and to adopt modern, rationalmethods of farming. Although conservative landowners tended by andlarge to support Stolypin’s reforms because they did not involve compul-sory confiscation of land, it is worth noting that the prime minister’slong-range goal was not to preserve the nobility as a privileged class. Hehad a much larger vision for Russia: he assumed that eventually therewould be only one agricultural class, a class of independent farmers.

The ukase of November 9 was actually the capstone of a series ofagrarian reforms introduced in 1906. In August the government an-nounced that it would make available for sale to peasants a modestamount of land from the state, the tsar’s personal holdings, and the prop-erties of the imperial family. Stolypin also facilitated the purchase of landby the Peasants’ Bank, which could then sell it to peasants on terms fa-vorable to them. Many landlords, frightened by the unrest and the possi-bility that their land would be confiscated, were eager to sell, often at rel-atively low prices. But capitalists did not rush to buy the land becausethey too feared confiscation, and peasants did not show great interest in



purchasing it because they expected all the land to be distributed to themfree of charge. Between 1896 and late 1905, the Peasants’ Bank acquired2,785 estates totaling 4.9 million desiatinas; over the next fourteenmonths, it acquired 7,617 estates with 8.7 million desiatinas of land.

On September 19 the government enacted a law opening up to colo-nization a substantial amount of land that belonged to His Majesty’sCabinet in the Altay region in West Siberia, where communes were notwidely established. The next ukase on the agrarian question, promul-gated on October 5, was much more far-reaching: it provided for an ex-tension of civil and personal rights to the peasants, narrowing the dis-tinction between them and other classes and thereby conferring many ofthe attributes of citizenship on them. Peasants were now permitted towork in administrative agencies of the state, to attend educational insti-tutions without prior permission from the commune, and to maintaintheir ties with their village communities if they entered the civil service orsome other profession. In addition, peasants could now become membersof another village community by acquiring land there without forfeitingmembership in their own community. They could move freely from oneregion to another so long as they received the appropriate permits fromtheir new place of residence. The election of peasants to zemstvos nolonger had to be approved by the provincial governor. Finally, the peas-ants were freed from various punishments previously imposed by thecommunal assembly and land captains for the infraction of regulations.

The key article of the ukase of November 9, the most far-reaching ofall the agrarian reforms, reads as follows: “Every head of a peasant hold-ing family allotment land by right of communal tenure is entitled at anytime to claim the appropriation as private property of his due share of thesaid land.” If no redistribution had been conducted during the precedingtwenty-four years, the peasant would receive all the land he was cultivat-ing at the time he requested separation from the commune. If redistribu-tion had taken place within that period, the peasant could still obtain theamount of land he was cultivating, but only until the next scheduled re-distribution, at which time changes might be made in the size of the indi-vidual holdings. The peasant was also guaranteed the use of the samequantity of meadowland to which he had been entitled as a member ofthe commune. Before the promulgation of the ukase, a peasant couldleave the commune as owner of the land he worked only with the ap-proval of the communal assembly, a cumbersome procedure that dis-couraged separation.

In addition, the ukase of November 9 made it easier for peasants tobring about consolidated ownership of the strips into which land wasdivided and thus to dissolve the commune. The strip system had beenintroduced centuries earlier to provide peasants with an equal share of

different types of land in the village. Because the strips were widely scat-tered, the peasants were forced to spend a part of their working daywalking from one strip to another, a waste of time and energy that re-duced productivity. Strip farming also militated against the use of ma-chinery. Prior to the reform of 1906, a unanimous vote of the communalassembly was needed before any consolidation would be enacted; now anaffirmative vote by two-thirds of the assembly sufficed.

To help communes in the difficult task of reallocating the land in theirvillages, the government established Land Organization Commissions.Stolypin wanted the entire process to be voluntary; peasants who wishedto stay in the commune might do so. But he did his best to encourage theprocess, and within a few years he even introduced measures that didaway with repartitioning under certain circumstances. It also became eas-ier to consolidate the strips, a majority vote rather than a two-thirds votebeing necessary.

The opposition rejected Stolypin’s bold reforms. Many liberals and allradicals denounced the ukase of November 9 because it did not providefor the expropriation of land; for that reason they predicted that the en-tire enterprise would fail. But some radicals implicitly conceded that thepolicy Stolypin was pursuing might divert the masses from a revolution-ary course. Although Lenin voiced conflicting views on the reform pro-gram, on at least one occasion he granted that it was leading to the “cre-ation of a peasant bourgeoisie.” The SRs, strong supporters of thecommune as an institution that facilitated socialist propaganda in the vil-lages, now began to stress cooperation between peasants rather than thesocialization of the land, a tacit acknowledgment that the commune waslosing the support of peasants. Kadet leaders disagreed among themselvesabout the desirability of preserving the commune, but all of them op-posed the ukase of November 9 because Stolypin had bypassed the Dumaby resorting to Article 87 of the Fundamental Law.

Stolypin was optimistic about his program, but even he did not thinkit could be fully implemented in less than twenty years. And he thoughtthat his resettlement program—migration to Siberia—would not be com-pleted until 1929. One specialist on the agrarian question, the formerminister of agriculture N. N. Kutler, predicted that it would take at leastone hundred years for Stolypin’s policy to have a decisive impact on thecountry. Although scholars differ in their estimates, their studies suggestthat the prime minister may have been too sanguine. To be sure, manypeasants showed interest in the reforms, but the obstacles impeding im-plementation were immense.

Sheer inertia, the unwillingness to change a lifetime of habits, playedan important role in inhibiting peasants from taking advantage of the



new laws. In addition, peasants did not necessarily find separation eco-nomically advantageous. At the same time, many villagers committed tothe principle of egalitarianism feared that the new law would inevitablyproduce greater inequalities in the countryside. Finally, social considera-tions militated against the success of the reform. Women, especially thosewhose husbands spent large parts of the year working in the cities far fromhome, felt comfortable with the social life in the village and feared the iso-lation that would invariably accompany secession from the commune.

Despite the government’s promise that the reform would be enacted ona purely voluntary basis, in many instances officials tried to coerce com-munes to proceed with secession. Enraged peasants at times resisted thepressure by resorting to violence. “Hostile manifestations,” one contem-porary noted, “toward separating members of communes often assumedbitter and barbaric forms. Fires, murders, and conflicts involving blood-shed were by no means rare occurrences. There was even a case of almostunbelievable atrocity in the drenching with oil of a departing member byhis fellow villagers, who burnt him like a live torch.”

An unqualified judgment on the effectiveness of Stolypin’s agrarian re-forms is difficult. His most ardent defenders claim that because of theoutbreak of the First World War and the Revolution of 1917 the reformscould not be fully implemented; consequently, it is unfair to belabor themfor failing to change Russia’s political landscape. But an examination ofthe reform process indicates that it was very slow to begin with and hadbecome markedly slower well before 1914. The number of applicationsreached its high point in early 1909 and declined sharply thereafter. Some508,000 households left the commune in 1908, 580,000 in 1909, and342,000 in 1910. In 1913 the number shrank to 135,000. By 1914,about 20 percent of the peasants had obtained ownership of their landwhile about 14 percent of the land had been withdrawn from communaltenure. And strip consolidation developed at an even slower pace. Atbest, then, the process would have taken many years to reach completion.Whether in the meantime political stability, one of Stolypin’s primarygoals, could have been achieved is open to doubt.

Nevertheless, the promulgation of the ukase of November 9 was abold and imaginative stroke on Stolypin’s part, almost certainly the mosteffective response to Russia’s agrarian crisis. But because of the inevitablyslow pace of so complex a process, a new eruption of political turbulencecould probably not have been avoided. Nevertheless, had the war notbroken out in 1914, the turbulence might not have taken the form it didin 1917. A substantial number of peasants did acquire their own prop-erty, and their attitudes toward economic and political issues were boundto change. Given more time for implementation, the agrarian reform

might have contributed to a more moderate resolution of the political cri-sis. That would not have been a mean achievement.

elections to the second duma

As soon as the agrarian reforms had been promulgated, Stolypin turnedhis attention to the election of the Second Duma, to which he attachedthe greatest importance. He wanted a legislature with which he would beable to cooperate in introducing further reforms and modernizing Rus-sian society, and he was prepared to intervene actively in the electoralprocess, which was virtually identical to that of the first election, on be-half of candidates to his liking. He legalized the Union of the RussianPeople and the Octobrists, and after some hesitation, the Group forPeaceful Renewal, a small party somewhat to the right of the Kadets. Healso used his discretionary fund to disburse substantial funds (about threemillion rubles a year) to conservative candidates and to some thirty news-papers. His assistant, Kryzhanovskii, was disappointed that these hand-outs did not yield more articles favorable to the government, a failure heattributed to the fact that most newspapers were controlled by the oppo-sition and “people of Jewish descent.” Nonetheless, conservatives wereable to wage a far more aggressive and successful campaign in this elec-tion than in the campaign for the First Duma. The extremists on the rightwere also helped by the fact that in a number of local regions the Octo-brists entered into electoral blocs with them despite the unwillingness ofthe Octobrist central committee to do so.

The Kadets, sobered by the ease with which Stolypin had managed todissolve the First Duma, adopted a moderate platform. Acknowledgingthat they had overestimated the speed with which they could transformthe old order, they declared that their goal must now be to preserve theachievements of the revolution, and that they must therefore repudiaterevolutionary methods. Instead of taking the old order “by storm,” asthey had attempted to do six months earlier, they intended to place the oldregime under an “orderly siege,” which would mean a long, drawn-outprocess of struggle against the authorities. They abandoned the demandfor a “responsible ministry,” and replaced it with a call for a “ministry en-joying the confidence of the Duma,” a much vaguer and more moderategoal. Under the new formula, the cabinet would not have to consist ofDuma deputies; it could be a cabinet composed of bureaucrats willing towork with the legislature. The Kadets’ previous aim of seeking to trans-form the Duma into a constituent assembly was omitted altogether. The



party adopted as its guiding principle the slogan, “Preserve the Duma atAll Costs.”

The leaders of the various socialist parties found it difficult to settle oncampaign tactics because many on the left still believed that movementscommitted to revolution ought not to have any truck with electoral poli-tics. But most party faithful of the Social Democratic and Socialist Revo-lutionary movements clearly wished to take part in the campaign, and inthe end all these radicals agreed to enter the legal political struggle. In-deed, it soon became clear that the masses still retained a remarkable de-gree of faith in the Duma. In St. Petersburg, for example, huge numbersof eligible workers flocked to the polls; worker participation there rangedfrom 70 to 100 percent.

The peasants also demonstrated strong support for the Duma. In thecentral Volga provinces an “overwhelming majority” of local observersreported that villagers had lost all confidence in the government and be-lieved that only the State Duma could be counted on to solve the agrarianquestion to their satisfaction. Even in regions where unrest had beenwidespread (in Penza and Saratov provinces), peasants now took an in-terest in political questions.

Given the authorities’ extensive intervention in the elections and ha-rassment of the opposition parties, the results can only be described as anignominious rout for the government. In fact, the Second Duma turnedout to be far more radical than the first. True, the Octobrists increasedtheir strength from thirteen to forty-four, and the extremists on the right,without any representation in the First Duma, succeeded in electing tendeputies and could count on the support of some fifty-four from otherfactions. But the number of left-wing deputies jumped from one hundredeleven to two hundred twenty-two, with the Social Democrats, SocialistRevolutionaries, and Popular Socialists numbering one hundred eighteen(as against seventeen in the First Duma), and the other party of the left(the Trudoviks) one hundred four.1 The parties of the center suffered a se-rious decline: ninety-nine seats were won by the Kadets and their adher-ents; in the First Duma these groups were supported by one hundredeighty-five deputies. The Muslim group elected thirty and the Cossackgroup seventeen. The Polish Kolo raised its number of deputies fromthirty-two to forty-six. The nonpartisans suffered the steepest decline,from one hundred twelve to fifty.

In addition to being much more polarized than the First Duma, the sec-ond contained far fewer seasoned political leaders. All the deputies who

1. The Popular Socialist Party, formed after the dissolution of the First Duma,was represented by sixteen deputies in the Second Duma. Politically, the PopularSocialists stood between the Kadets and SRs.

had signed the Vyborg Manifesto (some one hundred twenty Kadets alone)were disqualified from serving in the legislature. Moreover, the averagelevel of education of the deputies was lower: one hundred eighty-ninelawmakers (42 percent) in the First Duma had attended an institution ofhigher learning as against one hundred eleven (23 percent) in the second;an additional sixty-two deputies in the First Duma had completed sec-ondary school as against thirty-eight in the second; one hundred elevendeputies in the First Duma had completed primary school only as againstfifty-eight in the second. As a group, the members of the new Duma werealso considerably younger than their predecessors: approximately 56 per-cent were under forty years of age, compared with 42 percent in the firstlegislature; and about 15 percent of the deputies in 1906 had been overfifty years old, as against only 9 percent in the Second Duma. The lowerlevel of discourse and the greater outpouring of vituperation in the Sec-ond Duma may well be related to these differences in age and back-ground.

The election results shocked the government and its supporters, andonce again rumors circulated that the court was ready to remove Stolypinfrom office. On February 7, 1907, a meeting of the cabinet and seniorcourt officials was convoked in Tsarskoe Selo, a very unusual event. Theagenda consisted of two items: the election, and the stance to be taken to-ward the new Duma. Kokovtsov, the minister of finance, argued that thegovernment had to spell out its attitude toward the legislature quickly,since the foreign stock exchanges were extremely nervous about politicaldevelopments in Russia. The Europeans, he pointed out, feared that thepeople would not remain as calm as they had been during the period ofthe First Duma and its dissolution. Stolypin was more sanguine. It hadcome to his attention that the Kadets, “remembering the history of theFirst Duma,” had decided not to pursue a revolutionary tactic; on thecontrary, they intended to adhere strictly to the principles of constitu-tionalism. Stolypin expected the left to adopt revolutionary tactics imme-diately, but he assured the group that so long as the Kadets did not sup-port the radicals, the extremists would be unable to muster a majority forsuch an approach. Consequently, he was not convinced that relations be-tween the government and the legislature would immediately turn sour.He suggested that the government wait until the situation became clearerbefore reaching any decision on how to deal with the Duma. Stolypin’scomments made a strong impression on court officials, who were nowsplit on his fate and took no action to remove him.

Liberal society welcomed the election results, but there was little gloat-ing because it was widely believed that the government and the opposi-tion now faced a stalemate. The proponents of this position contended



that both the extremists on the right, who favored a quick dissolution ofthe Duma, and the extremists within the opposition, who advocated thedestruction of the old order with one “decisive blow,” were unrealistic intheir estimates of their political strength. The Kadets, still a major forcein the Duma and aware of the impending deadlock, thus appeared to bepursuing a sound policy in favoring an “orderly siege” of the old order.To the Kadets, moreover, it was beyond doubt that Stolypin had been sothoroughly repudiated in the elections that he would not be able to re-main in office very long. Once he quit, the court, unable to find compe-tent bureaucrats to fill the ministerial posts, would turn to moderates inthe Duma. In the meantime, it was critical for the legislature to pursue acautious course so as to win the confidence of the tsar and his advisers.

Whether the Kadet strategy of self-restraint was realistic is open todoubt. It assumed that the liberals would be able to hold in check thedeputies on the left, that the tsar would be willing to tolerate an extendedperiod of stalemate, and that he would dismiss Stolypin. But before theKadet strategy could be put to the test, the continuing violence from be-low further embittered relations between the authorities and the opposi-tion. Early in December 1906, three and a half months after the intro-duction of the field courts-martial, Stolypin expressed deep frustrationover his failure to put a complete stop to the terror. In the span of sixdays, from January 23 to January 29, 1907, terrorists killed fifty-two of-ficials, among them a governor, a deputy chief of police, and two okhranaagents. Also in January, the authorities nipped in the bud a plot to kill thetsar, and the police foiled an attempt to assassinate Count Witte.

Even before these latest incidents Stolypin made a daring move to mo-bilize public opinion against terrorism. Early in January 1907, he invitedMiliukov to his office and in a state of great agitation proposed a deal: ifthe Duma would condemn political assassinations, he would legalize theKadet Party, whose votes would be essential for such an action by the leg-islature. Stolypin had an ulterior motive. He thought that a repudiationof terror by the Kadet leadership might split the party, encouraging theright wing to align itself with the Octobrists and moderate conservatives.The result would be a pro-government majority in the Duma. It is notclear that Miliukov immediately grasped all the implications of the primeminister’s proposal, but he was taken aback by its boldness. He toldStolypin that he could not speak for the entire party, which for reasons of“political tactics,” refused to condemn revolutionary terror. In any case,it seemed to Miliukov unrealistic to expect the Kadets to cave in on thisissue to those who themselves regularly murdered political opponents.Stolypin then appealed to Miliukov not as the leader of a Duma factionbut as a contributor to Rech, a paper with very close ties to the Kadets.

“Write an article denouncing assassinations: I will be satisfied with that.”Miliukov still demurred, though he was tempted by the thought that hemight be able to end the persecution of his party. Finally, he agreed to runan article on condition that he would not sign it. Stolypin accepted thecondition, which seemed to him meaningless, since Miliukov’s style waseasily recognizable. Miliukov then added another condition. He wouldhave to secure the agreement of other Kadet leaders. Once again Stolypinyielded: if the article appeared, the party would be legalized.

Miliukov immediately mentioned the meeting to Petrunkevich, whoangrily rejected the entire arrangement, which, he believed, would ruinMiliukov’s reputation and severely harm the party. “No,” Petrunkevichsaid, “never! Better to destroy the party than to destroy it morally.” Mil-iukov decided not to write the article, and the prime minister drew fromthis “a conclusion appropriate for him.” In his memoirs, Miliukovclaimed that at the time he did not realize that “the fate of the Duma” de-pended on his making the necessary gesture, that is, issuing a statementuttering the “sacred words” denouncing political terror. The prime min-ister, Miliukov acknowledged years after the meeting, was under greatpressure from the right, and he needed “some sort of paper or some sortof gesture from the leading party in order to strengthen and perhaps evensave his own position. Otherwise he faced having to surrender to theright.” No one can be sure whether Miliukov’s “gesture” would have suf-ficed to establish better relations between the new Duma and the govern-ment, but his rejection of Stolypin’s proposal inevitably strengthened theconservatives’ conviction that the liberals still banked on a popular up-heaval to bring them to power. The Second Duma, scheduled to open onFebruary 20, promised to be even more turbulent than the first.


chapter 8

Coup d’État

deliberations in the duma

The Second Duma opened on February 20, 1907, without any fanfare.There was no reception at the Winter Palace, no address by the tsar, nolarge crowds in the streets exhorting the deputies to instant action on theamnesty issue. As the deputies entered the Tauride Palace, a small groupof people cheered the left-wing legislators, hissed the conservatives, andremained silent on seeing the Kadets. Beyond that, the people in the street“humorously asked the deputies about their opinions” on political issues.Most deputies appeared to agree with the Kadets that instead of puttingforth “hopeless demands,” the Duma should proceed prudently and sys-tematically seek to “conquer positions occupied by the strong enemy.”

This is not to suggest that the population at large was indifferent tothe Duma. Although the public mood was not as ebullient as it had beenten months earlier, peasants, workers, and society alike generally ap-plauded the resumption of legislative work by their representatives andshowed their support in numerous ways. Zemstvo boards, city councils,former deputies, various local societies, and private citizens sent thou-sands of encouraging telegrams to the Duma. Typical was the messagefrom the zemstvo employees in Tver Province, who expressed confidencethat the Duma would lead “Russia along the path developed by the bestelements of the country, along the path of peace and well-being.” The ed-itors of Russkie vedomosti were not far off the mark when they wrotethat the Duma “is at this moment the center of national life, the heart [ofthe nation], to which flow all aspirations of a people that has suffered[deeply].”

A day before the first session of the Duma, about three hundreddeputies—Kadets, Popular Socialists, Trudoviks, Socialist Revolutionaries,

and Mensheviks—met to elect F. A. Golovin, a long-standing member ofthe liberal movement and a Kadet, president of the Second Duma. Therewas not much enthusiasm for Golovin, but men of talent and experiencewere in short supply. He was rather shy, widely known as “the personwho does not speak,” and modest enough to believe that he did not havethe requisite abilities for the post. Two Trudoviks, N. N. Poznanskii andM. E. Berezin, were chosen as deputy presidents, and the Kadet M. V.Chelnokov was named the secretary. At the conclusion of the meeting,the group indicated a desire to “avoid any sort of incident” in the Duma.

Meanwhile, senior officials at court selected I. Ia. Golubev, assistantchairman of the State Council, to deliver the opening address in behalf ofthe throne. The officials decided that the government should do its ut-most not to provoke the legislature, which would be allowed to conductits business freely, in accordance with existing laws. If the good intentionsof the court and the opposition had carried over to the Duma, the secondpopularly elected legislature might have gone down in Russian history asone of the country’s great achievements.

As it happened, the very first session was marred by a minor scandal.Golubev opened the meeting with a greeting from the tsar, who expressedthe hope “that with God’s help your work in the State Duma will be fruit-ful for the happiness of dear Russia.” At this the right-wing deputy fromBessarabia, P. N. Krupenskii, shouted, “Long Live the Sovereign Emperor!Hurrah!” The other rightists immediately rose to their feet screaming,“Long live the Sovereign Emperor! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!” All theKadets and the other opposition deputies, including Golovin, remained intheir seats, which was interpreted by the right as a sign of the liberal-left’sdisloyalty to the throne. Actually, the deputies remained seated only be-cause they did not want to follow the lead of the rightists, who hadclearly planned the entire demonstration. It was an altogether inauspi-cious beginning.

Nonetheless, in his opening remarks, Golovin adopted a moderate ap-proach and spoke generally about the principal tasks of the Duma, whichwere to implement the October Manifesto and to enact social legislation.He then asked for an audience with the tsar and was received graciouslyon February 21. About two weeks later, on March 6, Stolypin addressedthe Duma and, despite some sharp attacks on him, he was satisfied withthe deputies’ reaction. The mood seemed to be quite different from theFirst Duma, where ministers were regularly met with shouting andwhistling. The prime minister thought that a moderate center-right coali-tion of Kadets, Octobrists, rightists, and the Polish Kolo might be formedand that it would cooperate with the government.

Stolypin’s interest in working harmoniously with the Duma was not

188 Coup d’État

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based simply on his desire to institutionalize the structure of governmentestablished by the Fundamental Laws. At this time he also believed thathis own political fate was closely linked to the fate of the Second Duma.If the legislature were again dissolved, people to the right of him, in par-ticular Durnovo, would argue that his entire political program wasflawed and that he should be dismissed. By the same token, many of thecooler heads in the Duma, aware that Stolypin’s positive attitude towardthe Duma was not popular at court, were willing to work with him to pro-tect him as well as the legislature. Thus, there appeared to be reason fordeputies to be optimistic that “the Duma will last longer than is assumed.”

The optimism was short lived. For one thing, Golovin’s relations withStolypin quickly soured. Golovin conceded that he was responsible inpart for a series of misunderstandings between them, but he placed mostof the blame on the prime minister, who, he claimed, tended to regard thelegislature as little more than a department subordinate to the govern-ment and its president as merely a department head obliged to take or-ders from the bureaucrats. Some of their specific disagreements appear tohave been trivial—over who controlled the entrance to the Duma or whohad jurisdiction of the police in the Tauride Palace—but they reflectedreal conflicts over the respective prerogatives of the prime minister andthe president and, by extension, over the independence of the legislature.

In any case, deputies in the Duma wasted little time before assaultinggovernment policies, which led Stolypin as early as March 14 to expressdoubts to the tsar about the chamber’s interest in legislative work afterall. Nicholas, in turn, believed that the intemperate speeches in the Duma“constitute a serious danger to tranquillity in the villages.” And, moreominously, he wrote to his mother that he was getting telegrams from allover the empire asking him to order a dissolution. “But it is too early forthat. One must let them [the deputies] do something manifestly stupid ormean, and then—slap! And they are gone.”

Inevitably, the Kadets, still the dominant force in the Duma, were heldresponsible for its conduct. True, they went to great lengths to delay avote on measures that would disturb the authorities, and they focused, in-stead, on incremental reforms rather than on an overhaul of the entirepolitical order. As Golovin described the approach, the Kadets wouldseek to form two different majorities: “On questions of ‘tactics,’ we willvote with the rightists, on questions of ‘program’ with the leftists.” More-over, four Kadet deputies—P. B. Struve, V. A. Maklakov, the Duma Secre-tary M. V. Chelnokov, and S. N. Bulgakov—took it on themselves to meetsecretly with the Stolypin on several occasions to promote cooperation be-tween the Duma and the government. It is symptomatic of the poisonedpolitical atmosphere in St. Petersburg that the four deputies considered it

the better part of wisdom not to inform their Kadet colleagues about themeetings, and not much is known about their discussions with the primeminister. Somehow, word of the contacts leaked out, and the four men ac-quired the unflattering appellation of “Black Hundred Kadets.”

At bottom, the Kadets’ overall strategy was based on a dubious prem-ise, that they could maintain a neat division between tactics and program.That such a division was illusory became clear very quickly as two key is-sues—terror and agrarian reform—came up for consideration. By resort-ing to various rules of procedure, the Kadets succeeded, for a time, in pre-venting a vote on both these explosive issues. But this approach could notwork for very long: it enraged the leftists, who accused the liberals ofabandoning their principles, and it convinced the government that theDuma was mired in endless debate and parliamentary maneuvers, ren-dering it incapable of constructive work. At the same time, right-wingdeputies reviled the Kadets, in particular the Kadet president, for notmuzzling the radicals, who seemed determined to use the Duma as a trib-une from which to agitate for revolution.

It soon became evident that the Kadet policy of preserving the Dumathrough moderation was doomed from the start because of the makeupof the legislature. Close to one-third of the deputies—the committed ex-tremists on the right and the left—were unalterably opposed to the legis-lature as an institution and made no secret of their intention to under-mine it. About another 20 percent did not care enough about the Duma’ssurvival to give solid support to the Kadet strategy.

The Kadet leaders’ task was further complicated by a lack of partyloyalty and discipline among the groups that might have formed a right-center coalition. For example, the Octobrist deputies were more sharplythan ever divided into two camps: the left wing was close to the Kadets,especially on the question of the field courts-martial; the right wing fa-vored the dissolution of the Duma and the promulgation of a more re-strictive electoral law. By the spring of 1907 the divisions in the Union ofOctober 17 was so deep-seated that the movement verged on extinction.The Polish Kolo, which commanded forty-six votes, failed to align itselfpermanently with any Duma group, switching its support from left toright, depending on the issue. And among the Kadets there was a groupof about a dozen who sympathized with the radical left; they did notopenly criticize their own party, but occasionally they voted with the left.Finally, a small number of Trudoviks alternated between support for theleft and the center-right. Several Trudoviks were actually expelled fromthe fraction for having voted with the Kadets on the agrarian question.The point is that the Kadets were trying to secure the passage of legisla-tion in a parliamentary body that was too fragmented ideologically andtoo undisciplined politically to attend to its own preservation.

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Actually, the committees worked quite effectively and took valuabletestimony on several major issues from expert witnesses. It was in theDuma itself that the Kadet plan for orderly procedures came to grief.

Hardly any of the sessions were wholly free of rancor, but thedeputies managed to avoid a major confrontation until the fifth session,on March 6, when Stolypin gave his first address. It was a measuredspeech, in which he outlined the government’s projects for the Duma’sconsideration. He stressed his goal of transforming the country into astate based on law by implementing the October Manifesto, to whichend he would be submitting bills guaranteeing civil liberties and reli-gious toleration. He then enumerated several specific areas in which re-forms should be adopted: local government, the legal system, labor con-ditions, agriculture, and education. The ukase of November 9 onagrarian reform would be submitted for review to the Duma and theState Council, as required by law. Toward the end of the speech, he ex-tended his hand to the deputies in a conciliatory gesture and pleaded forgoodwill and cooperation.

I. G. Tsereteli, and twenty-five-year-old Menshevik from Georgia, im-mediately rose to deliver a barrage of attacks on Stolypin and the gov-ernment so savage that it provoked the rightists into unseemly catcalls.Tsereteli denounced the autocratic government for being “indissolublylinked” to a small group of “landlords who advocate serfdom and live atthe expense of millions of hapless peasants,” for having placed the entirecountry under martial law, for having imprisoned its best sons, and forhaving squandered funds meant to aid starving people. When Tseretelideclared that “only with the direct support of the people” would it bepossible to stop the violence of the authorities, Golovin asked him “notto issue appeals for an armed uprising.” Tsereteli denied that he hadmade such an appeal, arguing that he was merely pointing out the obvi-ous, that the “government invites an armed uprising.”

Despite the best efforts of some Kadets to turn the debate to substan-tive issues, the polemics continued. V. M. Purishkevich, a right-wing fire-brand from Bessarabia, felt called on to denounce Tsereteli’s “seditiouscalls for an armed uprising” and government policies by stating, “Thereexists no state, no empire, where forceful, persistent, and firm measureswould not be applied to stamp out sedition.” But it was Stolypin himselfwho delivered the most eloquent and dramatic response to the left. En-raged by the tenor of the debate, he repeated his interest in working withthe Duma and in enacting the reforms he had mentioned in his speech.Nevertheless, the government would not shirk from its duty, it would notgive up its role as the protector of the state and the unity of the Russianpeople. And then he warned the deputies that his government would notbe indifferent to those who attacked it intemperately and encouraged

open defiance of the authorities. “Such attacks are aimed at paralyzingthe government, they all amount to two words addressed to the authori-ties: ‘Hands up.’ To these two words, gentlemen, the government must re-spond, in complete calm and secure in the knowledge that it is in theright, with only two words: ‘Not afraid.’” When Stolypin returned to hisseat, all the ministers gave him an ovation such as no other minister hadever received in the Duma. Maklakov, then a Kadet deputy, recalled that“many of us were only prevented by party discipline from applauding.[His speech] made an enormous impression throughout the country. . . .March 6 was the climax of Stolypin’s popularity.”

Golovin, no admirer of Stolypin’s, later conceded that the governmentand the right generally had emerged from the skirmish with a “moral vic-tory.” Although the prime minister was widely distrusted, he had indi-cated a willingness to work with the Duma. The deputies on the left,however, were unwilling to put him to the test. And the silence of the cen-ter during the debate was interpreted as a reluctance to cooperate withthe government even when the two did not disagree. It would have beenmuch wiser, according to Golovin, for the Duma to have been moreforthcoming, at least until the government’s intentions had becomeclearer.

Indeed, it soon became apparent that the extremists on the right andthe left were more interested in attacking each other, in hurling insultswith abandon, and in debating the virtues of mass action of one kind oranother than in passing legislation on concrete issues. The subjects underdiscussion varied, but at bottom many of the controversies centered onthe legitimacy of seeking change by revolutionary means. Both the right-ists and the leftists had been traumatized by the turbulence of the pre-ceding two years, and none of them could come to grips with the need tofocus on any issue less cosmic than revolution itself. With tedious regu-larity, debates degenerated into brawls.

In late March and early April, the capital was awash with new reportsof an impending dissolution of the Duma. Eager to avoid a crisis,Golovin sought an audience with the tsar to assure him that the legisla-ture was indeed making progress in its work. Nicholas said very little, butGolovin persuaded himself, and his colleagues, that he had succeeded inconvincing the tsar that the Duma could work constructively.

But on April 16, only six days after the meeting, a new storm burstforth at an executive meeting of the legislature called to discuss a tenta-tive request by the government for 463,000 recruits for the army andnavy for 1907. From the beginning, one leftist after another interruptedGeneral Rediger, who was making the case for the bill, but the uproar be-gan in earnest during a speech by A. G. Zurabov, a thirty-four-year-oldSocial Democrat from Armenia. Zurabov had served in the army during

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the Russo-Japanese War, which seemed to invest his comments on mili-tary affairs with a certain authority, but he spoke Russian with an accent,and this immediately made him suspect in the eyes of right-wingers. Heraised a storm when he criticized the bill on two grounds: (1) that servicein the army removes a large number of people from productive work, and(2) that the government misuses the troops by unleashing them againstthe people. To add injury to insult, he deprecated the army as worthlessin defending the country. The “army of autocratic Russia always was andwill [always] be defeated.” The right now let loose with a furious outcry:“Away with him! Get out!” Several right-wingers ran up to the rostrumshaking their fists at Zurabov, who turned pale. It looked as though theSocial Democrat would be physically assaulted then and there. Golovinrang the bell in an effort to restore calm, but to no effect. All the minis-ters and other officials made a great show of stalking out of the hall.Golovin recessed the meeting.

Fearful that the government now had the excuse it needed to dissolvethe Duma, Golovin rushed over to the ministerial pavilion to pacify itsoccupants. He insisted that Zurabov had not intended to insult the army,that he had merely expressed himself clumsily. No one took his com-ments seriously, and, in great distress, Golovin returned to his office,where he received a phone call from an angry Stolypin, who asked himto explain why neither the Duma nor Golovin himself had protestedagainst Zurabov’s slurs on the army. The prime minister also indicatedthat the tsar was now considering disbanding the Duma. In a desperateeffort to assuage the government’s anger, Golovin arranged to preventZurabov from completing his speech when the Duma reassembled. ButGolovin knew that that would not suffice to mollify Stolypin. He againcalled the prime minister, who invited him to his office in the middle ofthe night. The prime minister then arranged for the president of theDuma to meet Rediger, whose report to the tsar, Stolypin indicated,would be critical. Golovin assured the minister of defense that Zurabovhad misspoken and had not intended to insult the army. Rediger was sat-isfied and promised to advise the Nicholas not to dissolve the legislature.The tsar followed his advice.

On the surface, the political crisis caused by Zurabov’s speech seemedto have ended on a harmonious note. General Rediger was placated andthe deputies in the end adopted the government’s bill by a vote of 193 to129, an action that, in the president’s view, buttressed his claim that con-structive legislation was possible. Golovin now praised the “gallant”army and dismissed Zurabov’s comments as “sad.”

But at a meeting of the cabinet on April 17, virtually all the ministersargued that the legislature should not be allowed to remain in session.Stolypin had reached the same conclusion, but he wanted to wait until a

new electoral law was completed. Tsar Nicholas supported the primeminister. Although the cabinet’s deliberations were not made public,Golovin sensed that Stolypin’s attitude toward the Duma had changed.The prime minister now seemed to be indifferent to its affairs, rarely at-tended its sessions, and no longer initiated any discussions of the legisla-ture’s business with the president. Nevertheless, Golovin as well as mostdeputies had persuaded themselves that the government would permit theDuma to continue its work.

It did remain in session, but it did not manage to pass much legislation.During its fifty-three meetings held over a period of one hundred threedays (as against forty meetings held over seventy-two days for the FirstDuma), it adopted only three measures, one of which was turned down bythe State Council. It is not that there was a paucity of projects for theDuma to examine. Unlike Goremykin, Stolypin had diligently preparedhimself for the Duma, and by late March the government had submittedno fewer than one hundred fifty projects on such issues as the rule of law,civil liberties, education, taxation, and local government. And also unlikeGoremykin, Stolypin at first made a point of attending legislative sessionsand of expressing his desire to cooperate with the deputies. For about fiveweeks it actually seemed that despite signs of conflict, the government andlegislature might be able to cooperate; the center-right majority appearedto be holding.

The Duma’s most notable achievement was its cooperation with thegovernment on famine relief, which once again became a critical issue be-cause of the extremely poor harvest in 1906. According to one estimate,that year’s grain crop in European Russia (including Poland) and in thesouthern Caucasus was 17.5 percent below the average for the precedingfive years. In early 1907 there was widespread famine in the provinces ofSaratov, Samara, Kazan, Kutais, Orenburg, and Nizhnii-Novgorod. InKazan alone more than 190,000 people were going hungry. In April, theDuma voted about 23.5 million rubles for relief.

As in the First Duma, the agrarian issue caused some of the most viru-lent conflicts between the government and the legislature. But it was notuntil April 5 that the Duma elected a committee to draft a bill because theKadets had succeeded in delaying consideration of the issue, and whenthis was no longer possible, they managed to keep the discussions con-fined to the newly elected committee. The Trudoviks, however, insistedthat the matter be placed on the agenda of the Duma, and the conserva-tive deputies supported them on the procedural point because they ex-pected the legislature to come up with a measure unacceptable to thecourt, which would then feel obliged to dissolve the Duma.

A new wave of peasant unrest also spurred the Duma to take up theagrarian issue. Although the disturbances in the countryside were not on

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the same scale as in the fall of 1905 or the spring and summer of 1906,they were nonetheless serious. During the first six weeks of the Duma’sdeliberations, there were almost three times as many incidents as therehad been in the preceding six weeks; during the month of April the num-ber of disturbances approached two hundred. In part, the peasants weregalvanized by the Duma debates, which suggested that they would beable to count on support from many of the deputies. The unrest assumedthe usual forms and spread across the provinces of Poltava, Orlov,Voronezh, Tula, Smolensk, Minsk, Kursk, and Chernigov.

Early in May three different bills on the agrarian question were intro-duced in the chamber, all of them providing for a substantial degree ofexpropriation of privately lands. And all of them rejected the reformsStolypin had introduced under Article 87.

The Kadet leaders knew, of course, that the prime minister would notaccept any measures that undermined his program, and in a few privatemeetings with him they tried to reach a compromise. Stolypin, eager toavoid a dissolution, was prepared to make concessions on political andlegal issues, but he would not abandon his agrarian program. All hope ofcompromise ended on May 9, when the Duma committee adopted ameasure favoring expropriation of large amounts of privately ownedlands. The Kadets, fearful of losing the support of the increasingly mili-tant peasant deputies, supported the measure.

The next day, May 10, Stolypin made a last effort to dissuade theDuma from voting for any of the bills under consideration. In a wide-ranging speech, he warned that the plan of the left, which called for na-tionalization, would lead to nothing less than a “social revolution” on ascale unprecedented in human history. It would place everyone on anequal footing, but on the “lowest level,” resulting in economic and cul-tural decline. The Kadet plan of compulsory expropriation was also un-acceptable because it too abrogated the principle of private property. Inthe end, Stolypin predicted, all 130,000 landowners would be deprivedof their property, which would mean the “destruction . . . of [local] cen-ters of culture” and the ruin of the country. The prime minister urged theDuma to support the agrarian policies he had already introduced, thoughhe now conceded that in exceptional cases it might be necessary to con-fiscate some privately owned lands. For example, the construction of aroad passing through strips of private land might necessitate such an ex-treme action. Stolypin ended his speech, which was widely disseminated,with a powerful rhetorical flourish: “The opponents of the State systemwould like to choose the path of radicalism, a path alien to Russia’s his-torical past, alien to its cultural traditions. They need great upheavals, weneed a great Russia.”

The Kadets defended their stand, but, unwilling to provoke a dissolution

of the Duma, they allowed the debate on the agrarian issue to drag on forsome time, and on May 26 the chamber in effect decided to leave the is-sue in the hands of the recently created committee without any guidanceon how to proceed. But this did not satisfy Stolypin, who feared that theDuma would without warning adopt a bill he could not live with.

Revolutionary terror, a major concern to Stolypin, was another issuethat the Kadets wished to avoid, for it placed them in a dilemma. The con-servatives, Octobrists, and several members of the Group for Peaceful Re-newal agreed with the prime minister that a formal condemnation of ter-ror by the legislature was morally and politically necessary. But the Kadetsrefused to vote for such a measure lest it give the impression that theythereby were giving support to the field courts-martial. Moreover, theKadets were most anxious to avoid alienating the left. Even after the gov-ernment allowed the law on the field courts-martial to lapse on April 20—it knew that it could not secure an affirmative vote on it by the Duma—the Kadets continued to avoid any public censure of revolutionaryterrorism.

By mid-April 1907 Stolypin may actually have been relieved to let theukase on the special courts lapse. Although the evidence is necessarily im-pressionistic and inconclusive, it seems that at this time the extremists onthe right were perpetrating more acts of terror than those on the left.Stolypin did not approve of right-wing violence, but he would not havebeen eager to subject members of the Union of the Russian People todrumhead courts.

Certainly, the most notorious political murder at the time was thework of rightists. On March 14, G. G. Iollos, an editor of the liberalRusskie vedomosti and a Jew who had been a Kadet deputy in the FirstDuma, fell victim to an assassin’s bullets in broad daylight in Moscow.His funeral on March 19 became one of those poignant political eventsthat occurred only too frequently during the revolutionary upheaval.Some twenty thousand people, including a large part of the cultural eliteof Moscow, joined the procession despite a heavy downpour. Stolypinpersonally informed the minister of justice that it was his “categoricalwish” that the police take all necessary measures to apprehend the mur-derer. If any organization was found to have planned the assassination,its leader was to be brought to justice. But as in previous such instances,the police did not look all that hard for the murderer, in part out of fearof uncovering links between the government and the URP. It subsequentlyturned out that the killer, a certain Fedorov, had been hired for the assas-sination by a URP operative. By that time he had fled to Paris and wasnever apprehended.

The assassination of Iollos was part of a right-wing campaign of terroragainst the opposition. Beginning early in 1907, the URP sent death threats

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to many Kadet deputies and numerous reports circulated in various partsof the country that the rightists were planning a series of pogroms againstJews. On April 24, there were anti-Jewish incidents in Odessa and in thesuburb of Romanevko as well as in Kiev and Ekaterinoslav.

In the meantime, the government continued to rule with a mailed fist,clear evidence that the authorities remained apprehensive about the pub-lic mood. Whenever the emergency regulations expired in any region, thegovernment extended them. From mid-January 1907 until the end ofMay, officials shut down, either permanently or for short period of time,226 daily newspapers. In St. Petersburg the police forced several tradeunions to close and dramatically stepped up searches of private resi-dences and arrests of people suspected of antigovernment activities. OnApril 14, the minister of justice begged Stolypin for funds to build addi-tional prisons to house the one thousand people who were being takeninto custody each month for political crimes. The restoration of order,one of Stolypin’s primary goals, remained elusive in the spring of 1907.

dissolution of the second duma

In mid-May rumors of an impending dissolution of the Duma once againpreoccupied political circles in St. Petersburg. To head off the move,Golovin requested an audience with the tsar, the fourth private meetingsince the legislature had begun its deliberations. Nicholas was cordial andlistened carefully to Golovin’s account of the Duma’s work during thepreceding few weeks and to his insistence that it could work construc-tively. Beyond that, the tsar merely expressed some general criticism ofthe Duma and hoped that the president’s optimistic views would prove tobe correct. Even though it was an inconclusive meeting, many liberalschose to believe that the Duma was safe. Some five years later, however,when Golovin wrote a full account of the meeting with the tsar, he notedthat he had been betrayed. He quoted the words of N. A. Khomiakov, aleading Octobrists, to the effect that Nicholas “does not lie, but he alsodoes not tell the truth.”

It is not known exactly when Nicholas gave the order to dissolve theDuma, but there is little doubt that he had been committed to that actionfor several weeks and was simply waiting for a good pretext. AlthoughStolypin continued to hope that such drastic action could be avoided, latein April or early in May he authorized Kryzhanovskii to formulate newelectoral procedures that would produce a majority of deputies from the“more cultivated strata of the population.” Also, sometime in AprilStolypin charged A. V. Gerasimov, the head of the St. Petersburg Okhrana,

with locating documents that would implicate Social Democraticdeputies in a conspiracy against the state. Actually, the prime ministerwas at this time pursuing a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, inhis speech on the agrarian question he made a conciliatory gesture byproposing to expropriate some privately held lands. On the other hand,he sought to placate the tsar and the court entourage, who were increas-ingly critical of what they regarded as his insufficiently tough stance to-ward the Duma. Not until late May, when it became evident that theDuma would not support his agrarian program, did he fully commit him-self to drastic action against the legislature.

By that time a series of bizarre episodes provided the government withthe pretext it felt it needed. It all began with what was by now a fairlyroutine police action, a raid of a deputy’s apartment. On the night ofMay 5 several policemen, tipped off about a planned meeting of soldierswith radical deputies, burst into the residence of I. P. Ozol, a Menshevikdeputy from Riga, conducted an extensive search, and detained somethirty-five legislators. No soldiers were in the apartment; nor did the po-lice find the incriminating evidence they were looking for. But on May 7,during an interpellation about a “series of illegal actions” and violationof deputies’ immunity in connection with the entry into Ozol’s apart-ment, Stolypin announced that during further police searches on May 6evidence linking Ozol to a military-revolutionary committee had turnedup. The aim of the committee, according to Stolypin, “is to provoke anuprising within the army.” The prime minister justified the police actionand the violation of the deputies’ immunity on the ground that the au-thorities had the “responsibility to preserve the public safety.”

The government had taken these actions on the basis of very sketchyinformation. Several days before the search of Ozol’s apartment, the po-lice had obtained some evidence, probably from one of its agents, E. N.Shornikova, that at a recent meeting at the Polytechnical Institute, L. G.Gerus, a Menshevik deputy, had listened to soldiers complain about con-ditions in the service; the soldiers had also been asked to indicate whatthe Duma might do to revolutionize the army. Moreover, the secret policehad laid its hands on an “instruction” drafted largely by V. S. Voitinskii,a Bolshevik activist; it urged the Social Democratic fraction in the Dumato demonstrate interest in the plight and personal needs of the soldiers byintroducing a bill guaranteeing their rights and improving their condi-tions. The Social Democratic fraction, according to the instruction,should appeal for support to all sectors of the army and should invite sol-diers’ representatives to meet them at their headquarters. The instructionpromised that if the government sought to expel the SD deputies from theDuma for these actions, the army would come to their support. The last

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point, of course, was the most damaging to the deputies; it seemed to im-plicate them in a military plot against the authorities. But the instructionamounted to a rather general statement and it did not directly implicateall the SD deputies. Moreover, the police obviously did not want to revealhow they had obtained the document. They therefore conducted addi-tional searches of Ozol’s apartment, but they did not find what they werelooking for.

But this failure did not deter the authorities from taking a momentousdecision. According to Gerasimov, as soon as Stolypin and the ministerof justice saw the instruction, they felt confident that they had the evi-dence they needed to charge the Social Democratic representatives withconspiracy. They decided then and there “to ask the State Duma to sur-render the Social Democratic deputies for judicial proceedings and if it re-fused, [the government] would not shrink from dissolving the Duma.”On June 1, as Golovin noted in his diary, “the long awaited catastrophe. . . struck. The death agony of the Duma [began].” In the morning, thepresident received a brief note from Stolypin requesting the floor at thenext sitting. Stolypin also invoked Article 44 of the regulations, whichpermitted him to request that the session be closed to the public.

As soon as the session began, Stolypin stepped up to the tribune andannounced that the procurator of the St. Petersburg Provincial SupremeCourt, P. D. Kamyshanskii, had decided to indict some of the deputies,who, according to documents found in Ozol’s apartment, belonged to acriminal organization. Kamyshanskii then described the search of Ozol’sapartment and claimed that the police had found convincing evidencethat all fifty-five Social Democratic deputies were members of an organi-zation dedicated to the violent overthrow of the government and its re-placement with a democratic republic. The procurator asked the Dumato lift the deputies’ immunity and expel them from the legislature so thata full investigation could be conducted. He indicated that sixteen of theSDs had played only an advisory role in the organization and thereforeno action would be taken against them; sixteen others, however, were tobe taken into custody immediately for investigation.

Determined to remain at all costs within the bounds of legality and tobe as accommodating as possible so as to preserve the Duma, the cham-ber decided to select a committee of twenty-two deputies to examine thecase against the Social Democrats. Its report would then serve as the ba-sis for further deliberations and possible action by the entire body. TheSDs were enraged and warned that to give in to Stolypin’s demandswould be tantamount to a partial dissolution of the Duma. Then, severalof them made the unwise comment that the authorities did not need toturn to dubious documents to discover the aims and methods of the Social

Democrats, who had always insisted on maintaining close links with themasses, a comment that could be construed as an admission that thecharges against the fifty-five deputies were well grounded. Disregardingthe SDs’ objections, the Duma voted to establish a committee to bechaired by Kizevetter to examine the government’s case. It was to reportto the chamber by 7:00 pm the next day, which meant that if it workedthrough the night it would have about nineteen hours to complete itstask, an impossible assignment.

In the meantime, the Duma continued to debate a project on localcourts so as to send a message to the country that even at the moment ofacute crisis it continued to conduct business as usual. As expected,Kizevetter’s committee could not complete its work in the allotted time,especially since it found some dubious claims in the official charges, andthe more it probed the charges “the clearer it became that the SD fractionhad not organized any kind of military conspiracy.” At 7:00 pm the com-mittee informed the Duma that it had not yet completed its work, andthat it would need two more days to study the material. Golovin tele-phoned the prime minister to let him know about the delay and to askwhether the Duma would be disbanded if the committee did not submitits report that evening. Stolypin’s “answer was completely reassuring.”

The authorities, however, had taken measures that told a differentstory. As early as June 1 the police searched the apartments of severalSD and SR deputies and began a massive roundup of individuals sus-pected of supporting left-wing causes. Also on that day, a large numberof policemen had been stationed near the Tauride Palace. Whenever acrowd of citizens appeared on a street of the capital, mounted patrols aswell as numerous agents from the secret police were sent to the area. To-ward evening, additional policemen were deployed in various parts ofSt. Petersburg.

In a desperate attempt to change Stolypin’s mind, the four Kadets whohad secretly met him from time to time took it on themselves to visit theprime minister late in the evening of June 2 to warn him that it would be“sheer madness” to dissolve the Duma. The conversation began on asour note. When the Kadets claimed that the charges against the SocialDemocrats were unfounded, Stolypin shot back, “I will not discuss thiswith you: if the judicial authorities say that there is proof, this must beaccepted as the starting point for action, for us and for you. . . . While wetalk here, Social Democrats are roaming from one factory to another in-citing workers.” But he perked up when Bulgakov informed him that theagrarian committee did not intend to adopt the plan on compulsory ex-propriation of private lands after all. If that was indeed the case, it

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seemed to Stolypin that there was no reason at all not to expel the SocialDemocrats from the Duma. “Liberate the Duma of [the Social Democ-rats], and you will see how well we will be able to work together.” TheKadets would command the support of a majority of the legislature andwould be able to implement their program. “You will see,” Stolypin con-tinued, “how everything will then go well. Why don’t you want this?”Maklakov replied that “we would be ashamed to look each other in theface” if they agreed to the expulsion. “I myself am a rightist Kadet andwill vote against you.” To which Stolypin responded, “Well, then there isnothing to be done . . . only remember what I say to you: now it is youwho are dissolving the Duma.”

One of the Kadets asked the prime minister whether he expected anyunrest in response to the dissolution. “No,” he said, “Perhaps purely lo-cal [incidents]; but this is not important.” Stolypin could confidentlymake this prediction. Since mid-May he had received two detailed andcautiously optimistic assessments from the Department Police on how thepeople throughout the country were responding to the deliberations ofthe Duma. Although there were pockets of strong hostility toward thegovernment, overall the country was calm, and the authors of the reportsdid not anticipate any major explosions in the near future.

The prime minister concluded the meeting with a surprisingly cordialstatement: “I hope to meet all of you in the Third Duma. My only pleas-ant memory of the Second Duma is my acquaintance with you. I hopethat when you get to know me better, you will not regard me as such avillain as people generally consider me.” Maklakov could not contain hisanger: “I will not be in the Third Duma. You have destroyed all ourwork, and our voters will turn to the left. Now they will not elect us.”Stolypin grinned enigmatically. Maklakov posed one final question: “Orwill you change the electoral law, effecting a coup d’état? This would notbe better.” Stolypin did not answer.

The last-ditch appeal by the Kadets was bound to fail, for Stolypin hadnow concluded that he could never cooperate with the Duma as it wasthen constituted. The differences over the agrarian issue were no doubtvery important in leading him to that conclusion, but the final conversa-tion with the Kadets suggests that political considerations were also crit-ical. Even Bulgakov’s revelation that the Kadets had decided to abandonthe plank on compulsory expropriation did not prompt Stolypin tochange his mind about the Duma. He may simply not have trusted theKadets on this issue, or he may have doubted whether the four deputieswho had visited him were authentic spokesmen for the Kadet Party, but italso seems that he had become convinced at this point that nothing short

of a fundamental political change would do. After all, his conflicts withthe legislature ever since March 6 had not centered on the agrarian issuealone. He had believed all along that most deputies did not appreciate thenecessity of restoring law and order, which to him was a sine qua non forrestructuring Russian society. True, Stolypin did not accept the ultracon-servative view of the Duma as an institution whose very existence was in-compatible with the preservation of the monarchical order. Deep down,however, he too distrusted the Duma because it had never abandoned thedemand for radical change of the political system.

In any case, by the time the four Kadets visited him the prime ministerhad made an irrevocable decision to disband the Duma, and he had so in-formed the tsar. He had told Nicholas that he would ask the legislatureto expel the fifty-five SD deputies and to agree to the arrest of the sixteenwho were “most guilty” of conspiring against the state. He would notask for the arrest of all fifty-five, for that would smack of political re-venge. “I firmly believe,” Stolypin told the tsar on June 2, “that the Lordwill lead Russia to its predestined path, and that Your Majesty will havethe good fortune of seeing [the country] pacified and extolled.”

And Nicholas had advised Stolypin in no uncertain terms that hewould brook no delay. At 11:30 pm on June 2, he wrote the prime minis-ter that he had signed the new electoral law, and that

I waited all day long with impatience for notification from you that the dissolu-tion of the accursed Duma had been completed. But at the same time I feel in myheart that things are not moving along smoothly and are being dragged out. Thisis intolerable.—the Duma must be dissolved tomorrow, on Sunday morning. It isnecessary to display decisiveness and firmness to Russia. The dispersal of theDuma is now the right [thing to do] and vitally necessary. There must be no delay,not one minute of hesitation! God favors the bold.

Stolypin succeeded in keeping its leadership in the dark about when andhow he would act, just as he had a year earlier when the First Duma wasdisbanded. On the morning of June 3, “Golovin was having a late break-fast when he was visited by a foreign correspondent who asked him:‘Where are you going to live now, Mr. Golovin?’ ‘In Petersburg as long asthe Duma lasts.’ ‘But do you not know? The Duma is dissolved.’ For thesecond time, this was how the president of the Duma learnt of its disso-lution.” Golovin rushed to the headquarters of the Kadet fraction and tohis surprise found the place virtually deserted. Golovin asked someonewhether the deputies would again meet in Vyborg or somewhere else, andhe learned that the Kadet representatives had decided to remain calm andto go home. As he returned to his home in Moscow, he consoled himself

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with the thought “that the Duma had not done anything that could beused to accuse it of having violated the constitution and as a justificationfor a return to the old, preconstitutional order.”

At 6:00 am on Sunday, June 3, okhrana agents entered the TauridePalace and posted the manifesto of dissolution on the doors. Within theentire building there was “a deathly silence, broken by the occasionalloud orders issued by the bosses of the palace.” The city also remainedquiet throughout the day. The army was in a state of alert, but not a sin-gle unit was summoned from the barracks. Only on the streets near theTauride Palace, on the boulevards, and in the city gardens were the po-lice out in more force than usual. In other parts of the city, policemen ar-rested more than two hundred people, including the sixteen Social De-mocratic deputies at the center of the controversy. Other SD deputiesreceived notices to appear in court the next day.1 During the night of June3, the police arrested another three hundred citizens. By June 6 the totalnumber in custody had reached six hundred, and the authorities hadmoved soldiers out of the Petropavlovsk fortress to make room for thepolitical prisoners. The police conducted similar roundups in many othercities of the empire.

In the manifesto dissolving the Duma, Tsar Nicholas noted that hetook the action, “to Our regret,” because the legislature had failed to dis-charge its obligations. Instead of working to promote the well-being ofRussia, it had made clear its “intention to increase unrest and to promotethe disintegration of the state.” He pointed to “an action unprecedentedin the annals of history,” the participation of a group of elected officialsin a plot against the state and tsarist authority. He also announced that anew Duma would meet on November 1, but at the same time indicatedthat he would take appropriate measures to ensure that the new legisla-ture would be devoted to the strengthening of the Russian state; “theState Duma,” the manifesto declared, “must be Russian in spirit.”

To achieve that, a new electoral law for the selection of deputies hadbeen sent to the Senate for promulgation. Kryzhanovskii, who had beencharged with devising the new law, thought that he was being asked tosquare the circle. On the one hand, Stolypin directed him to come upwith a scheme that would ensure the election of “the more cultivatedstrata of the population,” that is, a chamber dominated by conservatives

1. The SD deputies arrested by the government remained in jail until No-vember 22, when they were brought to trial (which was closed to the public).On December 1 the court sentenced twenty-five of them to hard labor for fouryears, or to exile for an unspecified term; the court acquitted nine. The SDs whowere found guilty were deprived of their civil and political rights. A few SDswere never apprehended, and one died before the trial.

supportive of his program. On the other, Stolypin also wantedKryzhanovskii to remain faithful to the general principles underlying theprevious elections so that the new regulations would not appear to be atotal rejection of the concessions the autocracy had made in October1905. A loyal servant of the tsar, Kryzhanovskii accepted the assignment.

Kryzhanovskii proposed three options and the authorities accepted themost “brazen,” which altered the number of seats in the Duma assignedto particular geographical regions, social groups, and ethnic minorities,giving “trustworthy” citizens the lion’s share. Even then, the Senate is-sued several interpretations of the law to further limit the franchise ofvarious categories of voters. It was all thoroughly arbitrary and trans-parent, and it made for extraordinary complexity, but somehow itworked.

The essential features of the law can be briefly summarized. The sizeof the Duma was reduced from 542 to 442, almost entirely at the expenseof the outlying regions of the empire. The Steppe and Turkestan regions;the vast Turgai, Ural, and Iakutsk oblasts; the nomadic peoples of As-trakhan and Stavropol; and the Siberian Cossacks lost their representa-tion completely. The Duma delegations of the Poles, Armenians, andTatars were sharply reduced. Thus, the Poles, with a population of abouteleven million, would elect fourteen deputies, two of whom had to beRussian; in the Second Duma, it will be recalled, the Polish delegationnumbered forty-six. The roughly six million people of Transcaucasiacould elect seven deputies, one of whom would have to be Russian. Bycontrast, the province of Kursk, with a population of two and a half mil-lion, the vast majority ethnically Russian, was assigned eleven deputies;the three million citizens (also overwhelmingly Russian) of Tambovwould elect twelve. In addition, the law favored the affluent over themasses: the peasants would choose only half as many electors (those whomade the final selection of deputies) as they had chosen in 1906, and thelandowners a third more.

In the fifty-one provinces of European Russia, landowners would getroughly 49.6 percent of the electors, the urban population 26.2 percent,the peasants 21.7 percent, and industrial workers 2.3 percent. In slightlymore than half these provinces, landowners by themselves selected a ma-jority of the electors, and in the remaining provinces they could obtain amajority by forming alliances with one or another urban group. To re-duce the election of liberals in cities, eighteen of twenty-five urban cen-ters were deprived of the right to choose their own deputies by mergingthem with provincial constituencies. Women, men under the age oftwenty-five, students, and soldiers and sailors in active service were notgiven the franchise. Although the voting was fairly straightforward and

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direct in the large cities, elsewhere the system of indirect voting was socomplicated that the process resembled “walking through a labyrinth.”The elections were to proceed in three different stages, and the electorswho survived the process would meet in the capital of the provinces tochoose the deputies. As one contemporary observed, “The system is socalculated that, in the end, the big landowners are almost certain to se-cure a majority, and the peasants returned are usually those who seem tothe landowners fairly safe.”

The dissolution of the Duma and the promulgation of the new elec-toral law can be said to have marked the final defeat of the revolutionthat had started almost three years earlier. But did these measures amountto a coup d’état, as the opponents of the regime claimed? Were they a de-liberate violation of the constitution designed to reshape the state’s polit-ical system? Many defenders of the old order claimed that the authoritiescould not be fairly charged with having staged a coup because they hadsimply dissolved the Duma without, however, abolishing it as an institu-tion. And in doing so, they had acted within the law. This argumentmight be persuasive if the existing procedures for the election of a newDuma had been retained. But in changing those procedures the govern-ment had in fact violated the Fundamental Laws, Article 87 of whichstated specifically that this emergency article must not be used to “intro-duce changes either in the Fundamental Laws [themselves] or in the Or-ganic Laws of the State Council or the State Duma or in the provisionson elections to the Council or to the Duma.” In fact, in his memoirsKokovtsov noted that Stolypin was fully aware of what he was doing and“had had a great struggle with his own conscience before he had under-taken the task of revising the electoral law.” When Scheglovitov,Stolypin’s minister of justice, was asked in 1917 whether Stolypin under-stood that he was conducting a coup d’état, he answered, “I must saythat Stolypin was a distinctive person, very talented, a very passionateman, who attached little significance to juridical questions, and if a cer-tain measure seemed to him to be necessary then he would not counte-nance any impediments.” There can be little doubt that the prime minis-ter knowingly violated the constitution, not by breaching minortechnicalities but by radically transforming the political system.

By all accounts, the people of the Russian Empire reacted apatheticallyto the news of the Duma’s dissolution. All the major cities remained calm;in none of them was there even a large-scale demonstration. At most,workers would meet, adopt a resolution condemning the government,and go home. According to one informed observer, only in Kiev was thereany forceful action against the government; a battalion of sappers triedto stage an uprising, but it was a feeble affair that was quickly quelled.

A mood of indifference and despair also prevailed in the countryside.“Professor Harper and I,” Bernard Pares noted, “traveled widely in East-ern Russia immediately after the Dissolution. Everywhere we saw completeprostration and disillusionment. . . . A peasant of Saratov summed up forus better than anyone else the net result of the last five years: ‘Five yearsago there was belief and fear [of the Government]; now the belief is gone,and only the fear remains.’” In Kaluga Province, observers noted deep de-pression among the peasants. Even the liberal press reacted to the events ofJune 3 “with sullen resignation.” Russkie vedomosti mildly censured thegovernment and advised the people not to resort to boycotts or othersuch measures to protest the arbitrary action of the authorities. Tovar-ishch, the moderately left-wing paper, noted with astonishment that thecoup made a stronger impression in Western Europe than in Russia. Butperhaps that was not surprising, the editors suggested with obvious irony,because the “rotten West” was no longer used to such conduct by men inpower.

The opposition parties did not undertake any serious protest either. Al-though stunned by Stolypin’s coup, the Kadets, still smarting from thedismal failure of the protest against the dissolution of the First Duma,confined themselves to feeble criticisms of the authorities. The Octobristswere visibly troubled, especially by the new electoral law, but in publicthey tended to apologize for and even justify the coup d’état as a “regret-table necessity.” Even the Social Democrats avoided militant tactics. Itseemed to them that the workers in the capital and elsewhere were toodisorganized and too dispirited to respond to a call for a political strike.A conference of Social Democrats in Terioki on the night of June 7 urgedthe party as a whole to appeal to the masses to conduct propagandaamong the peasants for a general strike and armed uprising at some pointin the future. Finally, the Socialist Revolutionaries did no more than issuea proclamation criticizing the dissolution, though they contended that therevolution had not yet ended and, like the SDs, they urged their support-ers to prepare for the next round of the upheaval.

In large measure, absence of a vigorous popular reaction to the coupcan be traced to a pervasive weariness and loss of self-confidence. “Forthree years,” the liberal Vestnik Evropy noted, “we have spent [a greatdeal of] nervous energy without results; fatigue could not but be the con-sequence of the fruitless struggle of ideas against reality.” Not a single so-cial group—peasants, socialists, constitutionalists, zemtsy, professors,students—could fend off a mood of deep pessimism.

But, as most observers noted, the “comprehensive precautionary meas-ures” taken by the authorities also weighed heavily on the nation andwere an important factor in discouraging people from organizing

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protests. The crackdown affected the press, trade unions, and activists inthe opposition movement. Some statistics will suffice to indicate its mag-nitude. In Moscow alone, during the first ten days after the dissolutionofficials fined eight newspapers for disseminating “false information” andin the course of a year in St. Petersburg they closed down thirty-nine ofthe seventy-six trade unions that had been established since the beginningof the revolution. Total trade union membership in the capital droppedby some 40 percent. And the arrest of activists hostile to the governmentcontinued unabated. In St. Petersburg in the month of June about twothousand political arrests were reported, and similar roundups took placein various provincial capitals.

Although the dissolution did not evoke a large-scale protest move-ment, it was followed by a new outburst of lawlessness, both politicaland criminal. One of the more dramatic incidents occurred in Tiflis inmid-June. In an attack on a military escort transporting some 340,000rubles, Bolshevik militants killed two policemen and a Cossack, woundedabout fifty, and made off with the money. Another especially daring inci-dent took place on a pleasure boat, the Sofia, which was cruising in theBlack Sea some eighteen miles from Odessa. Three young men boardedthe ship during a dinner party and “proceeded to hold up the assembledcompany.” At the same time, two of their fellows overpowered the crewand forced them to take the ship to Odessa, where the intruders seizedfunds worth more than five thousand British pounds from an employeeof the Russian Bank for Foreign Trade and smaller sums from other pas-sengers. After destroying the machinery of the vessel, the thieves disap-peared on two small boats.

Stolypin was so disturbed by this new outbreak of violence that onJuly 7 he sent a circular to the chiefs of provincial gendarmes and theheads of provincial departments of the okhrana ordering them to takestronger measures against people involved in any form of unrest. To ob-tain speedy punishment, officials were urged to bring the accused beforemilitary district courts. Ten days earlier the authorities had issued a de-cree amending the military judicial code. Preliminary investigations couldnow be completed in one day rather than in three days; on August 10 thegovernment directed military commanders to appoint older officers asjudges because they were more likely than younger ones to be firm inmeting out punishments. In effect, the government was moving towardgiving to the military district courts functions similar to those of thelapsed field courts-martial.

Not until early August did observers in Russia detect a decline in ter-rorism and criminality, which, interestingly, was accompanied by a sig-nificant loss of interest in domestic politics. Newspapers no longer dwelt

as much on internal affairs and devoted an increasing number of articlesto foreign affairs. “The Russian people, generally speaking,” the Britishambassador to St. Petersburg concluded, “is at present tired of the cease-less internal troubles of the past, two, or nearly three years.” But he alsowarned that “it remains . . . to be seen how far this new feeling of apathyand ‘peace at any price’ will be a durable one.”

the third duma

Stolypin had to be content with his handiwork, for the result was thekind of legislature that he believed was needed to restore stable and ef-fective rule. Not only did the new, restrictive electoral law by itself workto his advantage. Within days after the dissolution of the Duma, localelection committees began to apply a variety of dubious measures to re-duce the number of eligible voters even further. As a consequence, onlyabout 19 percent of the eligible voters in sixty-seven cities of EuropeanRussia (roughly 10 percent of all the cities) participated in the electionsto the Third Duma, compared to 55 percent in 1906. The total numberof voters in these cities dropped from 307,930 to 195,000. Even in somerural areas with sizable numbers of large landowners, the registrationlists declined by 30 to 40 percent. The reason for these declines was againthe arbitrary exclusion of voters considered unreliable.

The composition of the Third Duma indicates how well the new elec-toral law served the government:

Grouping No.Rightists 51Polish Kolo 11Kadets 54Polish-Lithuanian Belorussian Group 7Muslim Group 8Progressives 28Moderate rightists 96Octobrists 154Trudoviks 14Social Democrats 18

Since the Octobrists had by now swung decisively to the right, the gov-ernment could generally count on the support of about three hundreddeputies out of a total of four hundred forty-one. Furthermore, thirty-

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two of the deputies on the right had clearly identified themselves as can-didates of the Union of the Russian People, which meant that slightlymore than 10 percent of the legislators in the conservative camp were notsimply pro-government but extremists who favored the restoration of thetsarist autocracy. On some issues, several Progressives also supported thegovernment, giving it an even more decisive majority. Put differently, if allthe national groups are counted as part of the opposition, which was trueonly to a degree, the combined strength of the parties that favored a fun-damental reordering of the country’s political system amounted to nomore than a third of the Duma. One need only compare these figureswith those for the First and Second Dumas to note how fundamentallythe empire’s structure of politics had been transformed. The opposition,the dominant force in the first two legislatures, had been reduced to a mi-nority that could do little more than criticize the government.

The social group that now emerged as the dominant political forcewas the landowning nobility, which was represented by 173 deputies, al-most 40 percent of the Duma’s membership. These noble deputies wereelected by some thirty thousand families, a fairly homogeneous groupeconomically, socially, and politically. Although not all the noble deputiesvoted consistently with the right, most did so; a mere handful of men thusexerted a powerful influence on the affairs of state in a country whosepopulation numbered about 130 million. The rightists could also counton the support of the fifty-three deputies who were Orthodox clergy-men—a much larger contingent than in the two preceding legislatures—and of the one deputy who was a Roman Catholic priest. Another twelvewho could be relied on to side with the authorities were government of-ficials. Significantly, only thirty-eight legislators came from the profes-sions, and only seven were businessmen. Of the remaining deputieswhose social origins are known, sixty-eight were peasants, twenty-sevenworkers, and seventeen Cossacks.

The drift to the right also manifested itself on the local level in variouszemstvo elections that took place at about the time of the dissolution orwithin a few weeks of that event. Again, a few statistics will suffice to tellthe tale. In the provinces of Poltava and Samara, only rightists won seats;in Tambov, twenty Octobrists, six members of the Union of the RussianPeople, and one Kadet were elected. These results marked a continuationof trends that had emerged in late 1906 and early 1907. A comparison ofthe political affiliations of chairmen of zemstvo assemblies in 1905 and1907 graphically demonstrates the changes that had occurred. In 1905the Kadets occupied fifteen chairmanships, the Progressives six, the Oc-tobrists thirteen, and the rightists none. Two years later, the figures wereKadets, one; Progressives, three; Octobrists, nineteen; rightists, eleven.

Thus, at all levels of the political arena the opposition suffered devas-

tating defeats. To most activists, it seemed as though all the struggles hadbeen for naught. The autocracy that in 1905 and 1906 had been forcedto concede a constitution was strong enough in 1907 to violate the con-stitution with impunity and to reassert its authority so effectively that allthe struggles and suffering appeared to have been in vain. In the monthsfollowing the dissolution, such a conclusion was not implausible, but infact the outcome of the revolution was not that clear-cut or bleak. In-deed, Russia in 1907 was not the Russia of 1904.

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I asked a man the other day, who is employed in the “Zemstva,”what party he belonged to. “I belong to the party of commonsense,” he answered; “unfortunately it does not exist.” This exactlysums up, I think, the impression that any impartial observer mustnecessarily derive from the present situation in Russia. Commonsense has gone. Hysteria and undisciplined rant have taken its place.

—Maurice Baring, A Year in Russia

This comment by the journalist Maurice Baring, made shortly after he ar-rived in St. Petersburg from Moscow in late 1905, does not by itself ade-quately explain the outcome of the Revolution of 1905, or, more accu-rately, of 1904–7. But it does point to one critical factor: both theopposition and the authorities were thoroughly unrealistic. The opposi-tion wanted to change the entire system overnight; the authorities clungto the belief that they could rule as they had for centuries, arbitrarily andwithout much regard to the interests on the vast majority of the people.

The lack of political maturity among all social groups underminedevery endeavor to reach a reasonable solution to the crisis. In none of thenegotiations over a coalition government—four in all during the three-year period—did either the authorities or the opposition bend sufficientlyto bring about an agreement. More important, the Duma, cherished bymost citizens as the greatest achievement of the revolution, as the institu-tion that would fulfill their deepest aspirations, met with such fierce hos-tility from the court and the government that its very existence seemedconstantly at risk. Few within society rejected the suspicion that theirruler had agreed to the Duma not as an authentic concession but as a sopto the people to surmount a serious crisis. At the same time, few withinthat body showed any inclination for compromise, or even for civil dis-course either with the authorities or with each other. Russia’s first en-counter with constitutionalism was not an edifying experience.

This universal intransigence was basically a legacy of Russia’s auto-cratic structure of rule, which did not allow for the emergence of leaderswith political acumen and independent judgment. Even Stolypin, whorecognized the need for fundamental reform, failed to understand thatthe changes he wished to introduce would not succeed if they were en-acted arbitrarily and without broad-based support. Nor was Stolypin atruly independent leader. A firm believer in autocracy, he abandoned re-forms that he considered essential when they were opposed by the auto-crat: witness the fate of his plan to lighten the burden on the Jews.

Ultimately, the failure of political leadership must be placed on theshoulders of the tsar himself. Despite his weak personality, he held fast tocertain principles. He wished to retain the autocracy even while permit-ting certain institutional changes, and he would not accord equal rightsto ethnic and religious minorities. None of the basic changes that Russiahad undergone over the preceding decades—industrialization, the emer-gence of social groups demanding a say in state policy, the growth of rad-ical movements, the decline in power resulting from the disastrous warwith Japan—induced him to alter his worldview. Every time an opportu-nity for accommodation with the opposition presented itself, he insistedon maintaining his prerogatives and thus prevented the only kind ofchange that could have produced stability. Most of his closest advisers,and by 1906 much of the landed nobility, had neither the foresight northe strength of character to resist him. They deluded themselves into be-lieving that the old order could be maintained indefinitely, and with ittheir long-standing privileges.

In many ways, the conduct of the opposition’s leadership mirroredthat of the authorities. Without experience in the give-and-take of parlia-mentary government, without training in genuine political work, the op-position, too, demonstrated astonishing intransigence. The leaders of thevarious protest movements refused to be satisfied with the proverbial halfa loaf and insisted on the rapid and total transformation of society, some-thing that probably could not have succeeded even under more auspi-cious circumstances. A more conciliatory attitude during the Days of Lib-erty in late 1905 or during the deliberations of the two Dumas mighthave left the authorities no alternative but to adopt a more reasonablestance. Certainly, the liberals’ refusal to repudiate and denounce terrorfrom below played into the hands of those who wished to continue torule with a mailed fist.

The intransigence of the opposition leaders also weakened the libera-tion movement itself. For most of the revolutionary period, the opposi-tion was split into warring groups incapable of a united effort against theautocracy. These splits greatly hampered the forces for change and were

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critical in helping the old order to survive. For Russia, it was a misfortunethat modernization did not occur gradually, so that the demands of vari-ous social groups might have been met sequentially. History is rarely thattidy. As it was, modernization came relatively late and produced at oneand the same time a whole array of parties and factions with irreconcil-able demands. Though united in their hatred of tsarism, the liberals, So-cialist Revolutionaries, Bolsheviks, and Mensheviks differed on too manyfundamental points to collaborate for any length of time. Only those inpower benefited from these divisions.

In fact, throughout 1905 the social groups represented by these polit-ical movements tended to act separately and in large measure sponta-neously in protesting against the old order. When the liberals launchedtheir campaign against the autocracy in late 1904, the workers, peasants,and minorities either remained aloof or participated only minimally.Worker unrest in early 1905 was viewed sympathetically by liberals butdid not lead to a coordinated protest movement. Meanwhile, peasant un-rest, though influenced by the turbulence in the cities, assumed a rhythmall its own. Disturbances began in the countryside during the summer of1905, when workers were relatively quiescent, and reached a crescendoin late 1905, after the new outburst of unrest in the cities had subsided.Similarly, ethnic minorities followed their own calendar in demandingchange. Nor, finally, did the major breaches of discipline in the militaryforces coincide with the most dramatic periods of political activism byother social groups. The bulk of the mutinies broke out after the workershad ended their most spectacular strike movement in the fall of that year.

In 1906, too, the absence of a coordinated effort by the protest move-ments had a strong bearing on the course of the revolution. The indus-trial workers, though by no means reconciled to the prevailing order,were not nearly so active in their opposition as they had been in 1905.Exhaustion, despair, and fear of unemployment had taken their toll. Thepeasants unleashed a new wave of unrest in the spring of 1906, but solong as their efforts were not coordinated with major activity elsewhere,the autocracy could not be brought to its knees. Also, the military unrestin the summer of 1906 caught the revolutionary parties by surprise; with-out their assistance, the mutinies inevitably petered out rather quickly,and where they did not, enough loyal troops were found to repress them.

Only once, during the general strike of October 1905, was there anysignificant degree of cooperation between the opposition groups with di-vergent long-range goals. Even on this occasion, the antigovernmentmovement was not planned. Still, once the strike had gained momentum,workers and liberals cooperated to such a remarkable extent that theircombined efforts came close to toppling the old regime. As it was, the

concession the government made to bring the crippling strike to an end,the October Manifesto, marked the most momentous achievement of theRevolution of 1905. One can only speculate on what might have beenachieved by a protest movement embracing all the discontented socialgroups acting in unison.

Considering the political conditions in Russia in the early twentiethcentury, such collaboration was too much to expect. Normal political ac-tivity was out of the question; as a result, the political movements thatemerged in the years immediately before the revolution had only the mostrudimentary organization and means of communication at their com-mand. In any case, in 1904 neither the liberal nor the radical leaderscould foresee the outbreak of an upheaval that might threaten the tsaristregime, and when that did happen, it was too late to forge a firm alliancebetween the aggrieved groups.

Senior officials were often at a loss as to how to respond to the unrest,and at times even the most talented among their number succumbed todespair. A confidential conversation in mid-May 1906 between the Russ-ian ambassador to London, Count A. K. Benkendorf, and his Germancounterpart is instructive in this regard. Benkendorf was thoroughly pes-simistic about Russia’s future because he considered all the ministersmediocre. Moreover, he was convinced that the Duma would accomplishnothing and would soon be dissolved, which in turn would set off a “gen-eral revolution.” In Benkendorf’s view, Witte was the one man who couldsave Russia, but only if he embarked “on a thoroughly radical transfor-mation of the Russian state organism.” But having said that, Benkendorfrelated the substance of a conversation he had had with Witte two yearsearlier, which suggested that even the future prime minister was too be-wildered to cope with the crisis. Benkendorf had posed several questionsto Witte. Should the war with Japan be continued? Should Russia begranted a constitution, or should the autocracy be retained? “To all thesequestions, Witte responded that it was impossible. When [Benkendorf] fi-nally asked what in his view should actually happen, [Witte] answered:‘Everyone in Russia is radical and I am the most radical of all.’”

Although Benkendorf’s account of Witte’s mood reveals the despair andparalysis that often beset the political leadership from 1904 to 1907, thegovernment was not quite as helpless as Witte claimed. Most notably, thebureaucracy, a pillar of the old order, remained essentially intact and con-tinued its faithful service to the monarch. The social structure also did notbreak down. In fact, in 1906 substantial sectors of the landowning nobil-ity that had favored moderate liberalism, alarmed by peasant unrest andthe breakdown of civil order, increasingly turned toward the right andsupported the tsar on key issues. Moreover, Witte himself took initiatives

214 Conclusion

Conclusion 215

that helped the autocracy withstand the crisis. During the general strikehe engineered the granting of the October Manifesto, a concession thatnot only curtailed the work stoppage and gave the authorities a new leaseon life, but also caused fatal splits with the opposition. Six months laterWitte succeeded in negotiating a huge foreign loan, which greatlystrengthened the regime at a critical moment. No less important, hehelped fashion the draconian policy that in late 1905 and early 1906 sup-pressed rebellious peasants and workers.

The repression continued at various levels of intensity for a year anda half. Shortly after Stolypin’s coup d’état, in June 1907, it seemed asthough Russia in the course of three years had come full circle. Most ofthe opposition’s aspirations—for a sovereign parliament, democraticsuffrage, and land reform, not to mention the additional demands of thesocialists—remained unfulfilled, and the most sweeping concession, theestablishment of an elected national assembly, had been severely under-mined. The tsar, the bureaucracy, and the noble landowners were in thesaddle once again.

Nevertheless, the empire’s political system had been changed in im-portant ways. True, the tsar still claimed to rule as an autocrat, but solong as the Duma continued to function, as it did until the end of the oldregime, the claim was not convincing. Neither he nor the bureaucracycould operate as arbitrarily as they had before. On many vital questionsthe tsar and his officials needed the support of the legislature. Althoughthe electoral law of June 3, 1907, deprived the masses of much of theirrepresentation, the Duma did not become a mere rubber stamp for thegovernment. That the Duma was a vibrant institution was demonstratedwith special force during the crisis of the old regime in 1916 and 1917. Asignificant majority in the legislature fiercely criticized the autocracy andin doing so spoke for large sectors of the nation. The provisional govern-ment that took control after the tsar’s abdication in February 1917 wasthe Duma’s creation. Without the reforms introduced during the Revolu-tion of 1905, such developments would have been inconceivable.

Moreover, from 1907 until 1917 Russia lived under a multiparty sys-tem, another legacy of the revolution. There was still much repression ofthe left, and the Kadets were never recognized as a legal party, but vari-ous parties (including the Kadets, Social Democrats, and Popular Social-ists) were represented in the Dumas, and radical as well as liberaldeputies frequently spoke out against official abuses. Although the gov-ernment continued to impose restrictions on the press, newspapers andjournals could deal with sensitive political and social issues much morefreely and in ways that were unimaginable before the revolution.

For many ordinary Russians, the Revolution of 1905 also produced

significant changes. Most notably, peasants found it much easier now torid themselves of the debilitating restrictions imposed on them by thecommune and to acquire property rights over the land they worked. Eventhough the trade union movement suffered some heavy blows atStolypin’s hands and declined sharply in the years from 1907 to 1912, itremained a viable force, and significant numbers of workers also partici-pated in clubs, cultural societies, consumer cooperatives, and productioncartels.

Slowly, painfully, against all odds, the Russian people were creating as-sociations free from government control; thus, they continued a processthat had received its greatest impetus during the Revolution of 1905.Russia in the years from 1907 to 1914 was not yet a civil society in theWestern sense. But the country had taken its first steps along the road tosuch a society, a prerequisite for a genuine constitutional order. True, themen and women who had initiated the struggle against the old order in1904 had hoped for much more, but in view of the obstacles they en-countered, their achievement was not negligible. As a revolution, 1905was a failure, but it was a failure that nonetheless brought about impor-tant institutional changes in Russia.

This is not to say that the changes were irreversible or that the strug-gle between the two political camps mentioned on the first page of thisbook had ended. After all, most countries undergoing transitions fromabsolutism to constitutionalism endured long periods of conflict; the pathto what is generally referred to as modernity has rarely been smooth, al-most never without many zigzags and major catastrophes. In France,where the transition can be said to have begun with the Revolution of1789 ended only in 1905, when republican institutions finally appearedto be firmly established. In those 116 years, France underwent at leastthree revolutions and several periods of political turmoil that threatenedthe foundations of the state. In Germany, or more accurately in the Ger-man states, the process took about a century, from 1848 to 1945, duringwhich there were two revolutions, a National Socialist regime, and twoterrible world wars, and even then the establishment of a constitutionalorder and representative government owes much to the policies of theWestern powers that occupied the country after 1945. Great Britain is of-ten held up as an example of a country with a long history of constitu-tionalism and political stability. But Britain, too, experienced a period ofpolitical turbulence and revolution that included the execution of a king.All that happened long ago, in the seventeenth century, so it is often over-looked.

If one takes such a long-range view of Russian history, then the Revo-lution of 1905 can be seen not simply as a failure or as an event that was

216 Conclusion

Conclusion 217

important because it led inexorably to 1917. On the contrary, 1905 shouldbe viewed as an upheaval that opened up new possibilities for the coun-try that were suppressed by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Seventy-four years later, in 1991, it turned out that even that cataclysmic eventdid not introduce a political system of very long duration. Over the lastthirteen years, the country has found itself in the throes of yet anotherupheaval, inspired to a large extent by the same ideals that had animatedmuch of the opposition in 1905: the rule of law; government by the peo-ple; individual rights; and respect for the rights of ethnic and religious mi-norities. Though aborted, the Revolution of 1905 left an enduring legacy:it initiated a process of political, economic, and social change that evennow still has not run its full course.

Suggested Reading

Ascher, Abraham. The Revolution of 1905. 2 vols. Stanford, CA, 1988–92.Baring, Maurice. A Year in Russia. 1907; rpt., London, 1917.Baron, Samuel H. Plekhanov: The Father of Russian Marxism. Stanford, CA,

1963.Becker, Seymour. Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia. DeKalb, IL,

1985.Bonnell, V. E. Roots of Rebellion: Workers’ Politics and Organizations in St.

Petersburg and Moscow: 1900–1914. Berkeley, CA, 1983.Brooks, J. When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Culture,

1861–1917. Princeton, NJ, 1985.Bushnell, J. Mutiny and Repression: Russian Soldiers in the Revolution of

1905–6. Bloomington, IN, 1985.Cunningham, James W. A Vanquished Hope: The Movement for Church Reform

in Russia, 1905–1906. New York, 1981.Daly, J. W. Autocracy Under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia,

1866–1905. DeKalb, IL, 1998.Edelman, Robert. Proletarian Peasants: The Revolution of 1905 in Russia’s

Southwest. Ithaca, NY, 1987.Emmons, Terence. The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elec-

tions in Russia. Cambridge, MA, 1983.Engelstein, Laura. Moscow, 1905: Working-Class Organization and Political

Conflict. Stanford, CA, 1982.Frankel, Jonathan. Prophesy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian

Jews, 1862–1917. Cambridge, 1981.Fuller, William C. Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881–1914.

Princeton, NJ, 1985.Galai, S. The Liberation Movement in Russia, 1900–1905. Cambridge, 1973.Getzler, I. Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat. Cam-

bridge, 1973.Harcave, Sidney. First Blood: The Russian Revolution of 1905. New York, 1964.Kassow, Samuel D. Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia. Berkeley,

CA, 1989.

Keep, J. L. H. The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia. Oxford, 1983.Levin, Alfred. The Second Duma: A Case Study of the Social Democratic Party

and the Russian Constitutional Experiment. New Haven, CT, 1940.Lieven, D. C. B. Nicholas II: Twilight of the Empire. New York, 1994.Macey, David A. J. Government and Peasant in Russia, 1881–1906: The Prehis-

tory of the Stolypin Reforms. DeKalb, IL, 1987.Malozemoff, Andrew. Russian Far Eastern Policy, 1881–1904: With Special Em-

phasis on the Causes of the Russo-Japanese War. Berkeley, CA, 1958.Manning, R. T. The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government.

Princeton, NJ, 1982.McReynolds, Louise. Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist

Era. Ithaca, NY, 2002.———. The News Under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-

Circulation Press. Princeton, NJ, 1991.Mehlinger, Howard D., and John M. Thompson. Count Witte and the Tsarist

Government in the 1905 Revolution. Bloomington, IN, 1972.Neuberger, Joan. Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg,

1900–1914. Berkeley, CA, 1993.Pipes, Richard. The Russian Revolution. New York, 1990.Reichman, Henry F. Railwaymen and Revolution: Russia, 1905. Berkeley, CA,

1987.Robbins Jr., R. G. The Tsar’s Viceroys: Russian Provincial Governors in the Last

Years of the Empire. Ithaca, NY, 1987.Robinson, G. T. Rural Russia Under the Old Regime. New York, 1932.Rogger, H. Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolutions, 1881–1917.

London and New York, 1983.Ruud, Charles A. Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press,

1804–1906. Toronto, 1982.Sablinsky, Walter. The Road to Bloody Sunday: Father Gapon and the St. Peters-

burg Massacre of 1905. Princeton, NJ, 1976.Seregny, Scott J. Russian Teachers and Peasant Revolution: The Politics of Edu-

cation in 1905. Bloomington, IN, 1985.Shanin, Teodor. The Roots of Otherness: Russia’s Turn of the Century. 2 vols.

New Haven, CT, 1986.Spector, Ivar. The First Russian Revolution: Its Impact on Asia. Englewood Cliffs,

NJ, 1962.Stites, Richard. The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism,

and Bolshevism, 1860–1930. Princeton, NJ, 1978.Surh, Gerald D. 1905 in St. Petersburg: Labor, Society, and Revolution. Stanford,

CA, 1989.Thompson, Arthur, and Robert A. Hart. The Uncertain Crusade: America and

the Russian Revolution of 1905. Amherst, MA, 1970.Verner, Andrew M. The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905

Revolution. Princeton, NJ, 1990.Von Laue, Theodore H. Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia. New

York, 1963.

220 Suggested Reading

Suggested Reading 221

Wcislo, Francis W. Reforming Rural Russia: State, Local Society, and NationalPolitics, 1855–1914. Princeton, NJ, 1990.

Weeks, Theodore R. Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism andRussification in the Western Frontier, 1863–1914. DeKalb, IL, 1996.

Weinberg, Robert. The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa: Blood on the Steps.Bloomington, IN, 1993.

Weissman, Neil B. Reform in Tsarist Russia: The State Bureaucracy and LocalGovernment, 1900–1914. New Brunswick, NJ, 1981.

Wolfe, B. D. Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History. New York,1948.

Wortman, R. S. Scenarios of Power: Myth and Reality in Russian Monarchy.Vol. 2. Princeton, NJ, 2000.

Index

Academic Union, 20“Active boycott,” 119Address from the Throne, 131–32, 134Agrarian question, 7f, 52–56, 139–45,

153–55, 180, 194–96, 216Agrarian unrest, ix, 7–8, 52–56, 49–50,

139–45, 194–95Akimov, M. G., 128Aladin, A. F., 136Alexander I, Tsar, 125Alexander III, Tsar, 3, 13, 47Alexandra Feodorovna, Empress, 23Alikhanov-Avarskii, A. M., General, 50All-Russian Congress of Marshals of the

Nobility, 117All-Russian Peasants’ Union, 56, 96All-Russian Union for the Equality of

Women, 62Altai region (West Siberia), 179Amnesty, for political prisoners, 132–33,

134, 136, 156Anarchists, 114, 147Answer to the Throne, 134, 136Appeal to the People, 156Aptekarskii Island, 168Armenia, Armenians, 192, 204Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws,

127, 177, 180, 205Article 129 of the Criminal Code, 116,

172Assembly of the Russian Factory

and Mill Workers of the City of St. Petersburg, 23

Association of Manufacturers andFactory Owners, 92

Astrakhan, 204

Autocratic Monarchist Party of the Cityof Ivanovo-Voznesensk, 113

Azef, E. F., 30, 114

Baku, 28, 148Baltic provinces (Estland, Livland, and

Kurland), 28, 47, 50–52, 95Banquet campaign, 19–20Baring, Maurice, 211Batum, 28, 50Bauman, N. E., 82, 167Benkendorf, A. K., Count, 214Berezin, M. E., 188Bertel, O. A., General, 57Bezobrazov, A. M., 14Bialystok pogrom, 149–51, 157Bismarck, Otto von, 161Black Hundred Kadets, 190Black Hundreds, 40, 45, 82, 119Black Sea Fleet, 57–58Bloody Sunday, iii, 25, 27, 29, 54Bolsheviks, Bolshevism, iii, 207, 213;

origins of, 11–12; and Bloody Sun-day, 25; party strength, 61–62; andgeneral strike (Oct. 1905), 69; andpartisan actions, 114; and Duma,119, 121f

Bulgakov, S. N., 189, 200–201Bulygin, A. G., Bulygin Constitution,

31, 34, 60, 76, 110–11Bund (General Union of Jewish Workers

in Russia and Poland), 62

Cahiers (peasant petitions), 54–55,142–44

Caucasus, 47, 52

Central Bureau of the All-RussianUnion of Railroad Employees andWorkers, 68

Chelnokov, M. V., 188fChemulpo, 14Cherevanin, N., 64Cherkassk region (Ukraine), 167Chernigov, 53, 85Chernov, V. M., 92Chita, 95Chukhnin, G. P., Admiral, 88Combat Organization of Srs, 10Commune, 7, 55, 179–81, 196Congress of City Council Representa-

tives (June 16, 1905), 59Congress of Zemstvo and City Council

Representatives (July 1905), 59, 60, 95Constanza, 58Constitutional Democratic Party

(Kadets), 123, 126, 161, 209, 215;founding congress of, 76–77; viewsof, 106; elections for First Duma,118–19, 121–22, 124; third congress(April 1906) of, 129–30; andBialystok pogrom, 151; and the un-employed, 148; on agrarian question,154, 180, 194–95; and Vyborg Mani-festo, 157–58; on field courts-martial,170, 196; and elections for the SecondDuma, 182, 184–85; repression of,171–72; on terrorism, 185–86; inSecond Duma, 187–91; and Stolypin,200–202; and dissolution of SecondDuma, 206; and Third Duma, 208

Cossacks, 45, 57–58, 68, 88, 99, 133,207

Crimean War (1853–56), 4Crown Councils: Feb. 1906, 125; April

1906, 126

Dan, F. I., 64Danilov, M. N., General, 108Days of Liberty, 90–97, 98, 212District Combat Committee, 103Dmowski, Roman, 48Dragomanov, M. I., General, 15Dubasov, F. V., Admiral, 101–2, 104Dubrovin, A. I., 78–79, 167Duma, State, 142, 186, 209, 211; pro-

posed by Bulygin Commission, 60;election of, 111, 119–23; First: delib-erations of, 131–39; dissolution of,153–59; Second: election of, 182–85;

deliberations of, 187–96; dissolutionof, 197–207; Third: 170, 201, 208–9

Durnovo, P. N., 75, 90, 109, 113, 115,129

Dvorianstvo (nobility, gentry), 8, 125,209

Echialauri (Georgia), 50Ekaterinoslav, 197Electoral Law of 1907, 204–5Emergency regulations of 1881 (or

Exceptional laws), 33, 109, 157Engelstein, Laura, 98Engineers’ Union, 20Ermolov, A. S., 32, 156Extraordinary Security, 22, 157

Fedorov, assassin, 196Fiedler Academy, 102Field courts-martial, 169–71, 196Financial Manifesto (Dec. 1905), 96Finland, 52Fourth (Unification) Congress of the

RSDWP (1906), 146Frederiks, V. B., Count, 73–74, 137Free Economic Society, 91, 96French loans to Russia, 123–24Frish, E. V., 150Fundamental Laws, 133, 135, 161, 177,

180, 189; revision of, 126–27;Kadets’ opposition to revision, 129–30; violation by government, 205

“Fundamental Law of the RussianEmpire” (drafted by liberals), 59

Gapon, Father Georgii Apollonovich, 7,21–28, 29–30

Geiden, P. A., Count, 117–35General strike (Oct. 1905), ix, 68–72,

213Georgia, 49–50Gerasimov, A. V., 90, 107, 197, 199Gerus, L. G., 198Gessen, I. V., 26Giliarovskii, 57Goloseevskaia Monastery, 81Golovin, F. A., 197, 199; career and

personal traits of, 188; and Stolypin,189; conduct as Duma President,191–92; and Zurabov affair, 193–94;and dissolution of Second Duma, 202

Golubev, I. Ia., 188Goremykin, I. L., 130, 137, 139, 144,

224 Index

Index 225

153, 162, 194; career and personaltraits of, 128–29; speech in FirstDuma, 135–36; attitude towardDuma, 138; departure from office, 156

Gorodiansk district (Chernigovprovince), 140

Great Britain, 216Great Russians, 13Gringmut, V. A., 175Grodno, 160Group for Peaceful Renewal, 182, 196Group for the Emancipation of Labor, 10Guchkov, A. I., 69, 78, 169, 175Guchkov, N. I., 106Guriia, 49–50Guriian Social Democratic Committee,

49Gurko, V. I., 121, 138, 155, 175–76,

177

Hamburg, 167Heine, Heinrich, 123Helsingfors, 114, 163Herzen, Alexander, 10Herzenstein, M. Ia., 166–67Hotel Belvedere, 157

Iakutsk oblast, 204Ignatiev, A. P., Count, 33Imperial Manifesto of February 18,

1905, 34–35, 54Imperial Theater, 69Industrial strikes, 6, 28, 41–43, 45–46,

93, 145–49Ingush, 145Institutions of higher learning, 19–20,

62–66Interpellations, 137, 153Iollos, G. G., 196Irkutsk, 95Iusevich-Krasovskii, N. M., 167Izvolskii, A. P., 129, 156Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Ivanovo-Vozne-

sensk Assembly of Delegates, 45–46

Jews, 13, 32, 78–79, 80, 83, 149–51,166, 172–74

Kadets, see Constitutional DemocraticParty

Kakhanov, I. S., 58Kakhetia (Georgia), 50Kamyshkanskii, P. D., 199

Kazan, 65, 66Kazantsev, Aleksandr, 167Kerch, 167Kerensky, A. F., 107Kharkov, 7, 20, 115, 148Kherson, 55Khilkov, M. I., 69Khrustalev-Nosar, G. S., 71, 92, 96Kiev, 52, 64, 66, 115, 197Kinstrik (Georgia), 50Kishinev, 41Kizevetter, A. A., 129, 200Kokovtsov, V. N., 97, 129, 135, 173;

favored concessions, 32, 38, 41;assessment of Goremykin, 128; onStolypin, 168; on agrarian reform,177; on Second Duma, 184

Kolo (Polish Circle), 133, 183, 188,190, 208

Königsberg, 99Kommisarov, M. S., Captain, 83Konstantin Fortress, 163Korea, 14Kovno, 28, 63Krasnoiarsk, 95Kronstadt, 87, 92, 162–64Krupenskii, P. N., 188Kryzhanovskii, S. E., 137, 182, 197,

203–4Kurlov, P. G., 83Kursk, 195, 204Kutler, N. N., 180

Labor unions, see WorkersLabor unrest, see Industrial strikes;

WorkersLake Baikal, 14Land Organization Commissions, 180Land Socialization Bill, 154Law of February 20, 1906, 142Law of March 4, 1906, 146Lenin, Vladimir, vii, 119, 164, 180; and

split within Russian Marxism, 11–12;strategy of in 1905, 71, 94–95; andthe Duma, 121–22, 146

Liadov, M. N., 100Libava (Libau), Latvia, 28Liberalism or liberals, 24, 44, 160, 212,

213, 215; emergence of in Russia, 8–10; and campaigns against autocracy,18–19; on October Manifesto, 74–75; and negotiations to enter Witte’sgovernment, 75–76; in precarious

position, 95–96; and Moscow upris-ing, 105–6; negotiations withStolypin over new government, 155–56; on agrarian reform, 180

Lidval Company, 175fLithuania, Lithuanian Democratic Party,

51Lumpenproletariat, 78

Maklakov, V. A., 189, 192, 201Manifesto of October 17, see October

ManifestoMarkovo Republic, 141Mariinskii Ballet, 69Martov, Iu. O., 11–12Marxism or Marxists, viii, 11, 114Matiushenko, A. N., 57Maximalists, 168Meeting “epidemic,” 67Meller-Zakomelskii, A. N., General, 51,

108Menshevism, Mensheviks, 12, 25, 61f,

119, 188, 213Mikhailichenko, M. I., 137–38Miliukov, P. N., 123, 129, 156, 157,

164; views on revolution, 44, 93; onwomen’s suffrage, 62; on OctoberManifesto, 74–75; on reformed StateCouncil, 126; on Answer to theThrone, 134; on Vyborg Manifesto,158; and Stolypin, 185f

Mikhailin, N. F., 82Minsk, 195Mikhailovsky, N. K., 87Military services (army and navy), see

Mutinies in military servicesMin, G. A., Colonel, 104, 167Ministry of Internal Affairs, 3, 28, 32Minor, O. S., 119Moderate rightists, 208Mogilev, 41Monarchist Party, 158Moscow, 23, 28, 40, 56, 65f, 147, 207;

October strike in, 68–70; Decemberuprising in, 97–106

Moscow City Council, 106Moscow Committee of Social Democ-

rats, 95Moscow uprising, viii, 97–105Moskovskie vedomosti, 158, 175Muromtsev, S. A., 134f, 156, 157Museum for Assistance to Labor, 100Muslim deputies, 183, 208

Mutinies in military services, 56–58,84–89, 151–52, 162–65

Nachalo, 94Narva Gate, 27Nationalism, national question, 12–13National League (Polish), 48Nedilov, D. A., 129Neidhardt, D. M., 83Neva River, 132, 168Nicholas II, 4, 16, 17, 40, 51, 104, 108,

110, 115–16, 154; committed to au-tocratic rule, 1, 3, 212, 215; personalqualifications, 2; and Russo-JapaneseWar, 14, 60–61; and reform, 20; andBloody Sunday, 28–29, 30–31, 34;inconsistent behavior of, 36–37, 113;urges harsh measures, 58, 72; andOctober Manifesto, 73–74, 175; andultraconservatives, 79; and Witte, 80,106–7, 127–28; and Jewish question,83, 173–74; and peasants, 123; andKokovtsov, 128; and First Duma,131–32; and Second Duma, 188f,192f, 194, 197, 202–3

Nikolai Nikolaevich, Grand Duke, 73–74

Nizhnee (Ekatorinoslav Province), 116Nizhnii-Novgorod, 40Nobility, see DvorianstvoNogorodtsev, P. I., 135Nogutsk (Stavropol province), 143Nonpartisans, 112, 133Novoe vremia, 92Novorossiisk, 95

Obolenskii, A. D., Prince, 80, 177October Manifesto, 81f, 88, 116, 140,

151, 175, 189, 215; issuance of, 73–75; importance of, 76, 79–80; andpeasant unrest, 85–86; Lenin on, 94;interpretations of, 111–13; ultracon-servatives on, 117

October (or Bolshevik) Revolution of1917, vii, viii, 181, 217

Octobrists, see Union of October 17Ochakov, 87–88Odessa, 7, 57–58, 115,197Okhrana, 2, 90, 197, 203Orekhov, M. D., 68Orel, 53Organic Laws of the State Council, 205Orlov, 195

226 Index

Index 227

Orlov, A. A., General, 108Orthodox Church, 2, 65, 127Ozaugueti (Georgia), 50Ozol, I. P., 198

Pale of Settlement, 13, 172Pamiat Azova, 163Pares, Bernard, 206Party of Democratic Reform, 150Parvus (A. L. Helfand), 94, 97Peaceful Renewal (party), 25“Peasant republics,” 141Peasants, 7–8, 52–56, 139–45, 153–55,

194–96, 216Peasants’ Land Bank, 155, 178, 179People’s Party (Ukraine), 52Petition campaign, Feb.-July 1905, 35,

55; spring of 1906, 141–44Petropavlovsk fortress, 203Petrunkevich, I. I., 35, 133, 186Physicians’ Union, 20Plehve, V. K., 3, 4, 14, 16Plekhanov, G. V., 10Pogroms, xi, 40, 81–85, 149–51Poland, Polish Kingdom, or Poles, 13,

46, 62, 96; unrest in, 47–49; andDuma, 122, 133, 183, 188, 190, 204,208

Police socialism, 6–7Polish Circle, see KoloPolish National Democrats, 122Polish-Lithuanian-Belorussian Group,

208Polish Socialist party (PPS), 48, 62, 96,

122Poltava, 7, 115, 195Polytechnical Institute (Kiev), 64Popular Socialists, 183, 187, 215Port Arthur, 14Portsmouth, Treaty of, 61Potemkin, 57–58Poznanskii, N. N., 188Pravitelstvennyi vestnik, 137Pravo, 121, 167Presnia District, 103, 104Printers (Moscow) and origins of

October general strike, 68Progressives, 208, 209Proletariat, see WorkersProtokols of the Elders of Zion, 78Provisional Government (1917), 215Pskov, 40, 87Punitive expeditions, 107–9

Purishkevich, V. M., 191Putilov plant, 25

Rabbi’s Speech, 78Radical Democratic Party (Ukraine), 52Rech, 121, 167, 185Red Cross, 141Rediger, A. F., General, 57, 115, 135,

151–52, 193Reforms of 1860’s and 1870’s, 4Regulations Against the Rise of Strikes

by Agricultural Workers (April 17,1906), 144

Reinforced Security, 33Rennenkampf, P. K., General, 108Revel (Tallin), 50–55, 162Revolution of 1917, vii, x, 181Revolutions in France, 216Revolutions in Germany, 216Riga, 28, 50–51Riman, A. K., Colonel, 108Rodichev, F. I., 170Romanevko, 197Rostov Grenadier Regiment, 101Rostov-on-Don, 105Rules of Internal Order, 6Russian Bank for Foreign Trade, 207Russification, 3, 48, 52Russkie vedomosti, 40, 96, 120, 139,

187, 196, 206Russo-Japanese War, x, 13–14, 48, 59,

60–61Rutenberg, Petr, 30

St. Petersburg, 22, 47, 72, 87, 96, 207;Gapon in, 23–30; Bloody Sunday in,25–28; workers’ unrest in, 25, 28,43f; student movement in, 65; Octo-ber strike in, 69ff; soviet in, 70–71,91ff; Days of Liberty in, 90ff; com-pared to Moscow, 97–99; appearanceof, when First Duma met, 131; laborunions in, 146; unemployment in,146–48; and dissolution of FirstDuma, 157; and Second Duma, 187,183, 200, 203

St. Petersburg City Council, 91, 147fSt. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’

Deputies, 70f, 74, 91, 92Samarin, F. D., 177Saratov, 115, 149, 160Schmidt, P. P., 87–88Schwanebach, P. Kh., 129, 162

Sergei Aleksandrovich, Grand Duke, 34Sevastopol, 57, 87Shantser, V. L. (Marat), 100, 102Shcheglovitov, I. G., 128, 169, 205Shelgunov, N. V., 87Shidlovsky, N. V., Shdlovsky Commis-

sion, 29, 37–38, 44Shipov, D. N., 17–18, 59, 60, 125, 156,

169, 175Shornikova, E. N., 198Siberian Cossacks, 204Simbirsk, 115Slavophilism, 18Smirnov, S. I., 25Smolensk, 195Social Democratic Party or RSDWP or

Social Democrats, 151, 164, 192–93,203, 215; origins of, 10–12; andGapon, 25; and armed struggle, 57;and the Soviet, 92; and the FinancialManifesto, 96; and the Duma, 122,133, 183, 198–200

Social Democratic Party of the Kingdomof Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL),48, 62, 74, 162, 206, 208

Socialist Revolutionary Party or SocialistRevolutionaries or Srs, 92, 99, 146,151, 213; origins of, 10; and terror-ism, 10, 16, 114, 168; strength of,61–62; and Financial Manifesto, 96;and Moscow uprising, 103; and theDuma, 119, 122, 133, 187, 206; andthe commune, 180

Sofia (ship), 207Soiuz osvobozhdeniia (Union of Libera-

tion), 9, 19, 21, 76Sollogub, V. U., General, 106, 108Soviet of the Unemployed, 147–48Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, 71, 163–64Soviet (council), 44–46, 70–72, 103Star Chamber, 113State Council, 113, 124–25, 134, 153,

194Stavropol, 204Stolypin, P. A., xi, 129, 137, 174–76,

207f, 212, 216; and the Jewish ques-tion, 83, 149–51, 172–74; and FirstDuma, 156; career and personal traitsof, 160–62; response to unrest, 162–66; assassination attempt on, 168;and field courts-martial, 169–71; andKadets, 171–72; and agrarian reform,176–82; and Second Duma, 182–84,

188–90, 191–92; and Miliukov, 185–86; and Zurabov affair, 193–94, 195;and dissolution of Second Duma,197–203, 205–6; and elections forThird Duma, 204–5

“Stolypin necktie,” 170Struve, P. B., 21, 189Sukhomlinov, V. A., 109Sveaborg, 162–64Sviatopolk-Mirsky, P. D., Prince, 16–17,

18, 20, 31Svirepy, 87

Tatars, 204Tauride Palace, 132, 187, 189, 200, 203Terioki (Finland), 166Third element, 9, 19Tiflis, 28, 148fTovarishch, 170, 206Transcaucasia, 204Trans-Siberian Railroad, 14–15Trepov, D. F., General, 31f, 63–65, 72,

74, 80, 113, 126, 156Trotsky, Leon (L. D. Bronstein), 71, 94,

96Trubetskoi, S. N., Prince, 15, 35–36,

67–68Trudoviks, 138, 208; program of, 133,

154; in Second Duma, 183, 187–88;tactics of, 190; on agrarian issue, 194

Tsereteli, I. G., 191Tula, 195Turgai oblast, 204

Ukase of December 6, 1905, 109Ukase of December 12, 1904, 20–21Ukase of February 18, 1905, 34Ukase of November 9, 1906, 178–80,

181Ukase of November 29, 1905, 93Ukraine, 51Unemployment, 146–49Union of Liberation, see Soiuz os-

vobozhdeniiaUnion of October 17 or Octobrists, 106,

182, 185, 188, 197, 209; foundingand program of, 77–78, divisionswithin, 117–18, 125–26, 175, 190;strength of, 121–22, 183; negotia-tions about new ministry, 155–56; onfield courts-martial, 169; on terror-ism, 196; on dissolution of SecondDuma, 206; and Third Duma, 208

228 Index

Index 229

Union of the Russian People or URP,78–79, 121, 167, 182, 196, 209

Union of Ticket Collectors of theMoscow-Brest-Litovsk Railway, 100

Union of Unions, 20, 44Universities, see Institutions of higher

learningUral oblast, 204Urusov, S. D., Prince, 76, 150–51

Vakulenchik, G. M., 57–58Vasilchikov, B. A., Prince, 177Vasilev, A. N., 101–2Vasilev-Iuzhin, M. I., 100Vestnik Evropy, 206Vilna, 28, 63Vladikavkaz garrison, 152Voitinskii, V. S., 198Vonliarliarskii, A. V., General, 167Voronezh, 115, 195Voronitsyn, I. P., 88Vpered, 116Vtory Birki (Kiev province), 143Vyborg, Vyborg Manifesto, 157–59,

171, 184, 202

Warsaw, 28, 80, 121What Is to Be Done?, 11Winter Palace, 131, 132, 168, 187“Without prior permission” (iavochnym

poriadkom), 39

Witte, S. Iu., 29, 69, 83, 95, 214; careerand views of, 4f, 20f; and Bloody Sun-day, 26; and October Manifesto, 72–73, 112f, 117; as Prime Minister, 75f,79f, 113; and unrest, 84ff; and St. Pe-tersburg Soviet, 92; and Moscow up-rising, 102; and punitive expeditions,106–7; illness of, 113f; and Frenchloans, 123f; and Fundamental Laws,126–28; departure from office, 127f

Workers or proletariat, x, 12, 32, 29,97–99, 213, 216; conditions of, 6;and zubatovshchina, 6f; and Gapon,21, 23–24; unrest among, 25, 28, 41–44, 45–46, 145–46; and ShidlovskyCommission, 37–38; and Octobergeneral strike, 67ff

World War I, 181

Zamiatin, General, 168Zemstvos, zemstvo movement, or

zemstvo employees, 35, 141, 179,209, 211; origins and activities of, 9;zemstvo congress (November 1904),17–19, 28. See also Congress of Zem-stvo and City Council Representatives

Zenzinov, V. M., 99Zubatov, S. V., and Zubatovshchina,

6–7, 23Zurabov, A. G., 192–93

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